The Lighthouse Directory

Welcome to the Lighthouse Directory, which provides information and links for more than 14,800 of the world's lighthouses. Latest update February 5, 2012. The pages for the mainland portion of Kagoshima prefecture in Japan, Northern Portugal, Bremen in Germany, Kaliningrad and the Khabarovsk Region in Russia, Syria, Puglia in Italy, Kerala and Karnataka in India, Guatemala, and Michigan's Western Upper Peninsula in the U.S. have been checked and revised, with a number of new photos.

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Marquette Harbor Light
Marquette Harbor Light, Western Upper Peninsula, Michigan, U.S.A., August 2011
Flickr Creative Commons photo by C.M. Hanchey

A Month of Lighthouse News:

  • February 9. The Heritage Canada Foundation has launched a new Save Canada's Lighthouses campaign.
  • February 9. A new $250,000 gramt will restore the keeper's house at Georgia's St. Simons Island Light.
  • February 8. High school students are helping to build a historically-accurate lantern for Washington's Admiralty Head Light.
  • February 4. In California, the Point San Luis Lighthouse Keepers office has moved to the newly restored duplex keeper's house at the light station.
  • January 27. Restoration of Virginia's Jones Point Light is complete, but the surrounding Jones Point Park will not open until June.
  • January 24. The Maughold Lighthouse on the Isle of Man is for sale, for a price expected to exceed £600,000.
  • January 23. New Zealand lighthouse fans are reassembling the historic lens of the Centre Island Light for display at the maritime museum in Bluff.
  • January 22. Sea-turtle advocates are seeking to have Florida's Hillsboro Inlet Light dimmed or extinguished to protect nesting turtles.
  • January 22. The Moose Point Lighthouse in Maine will be sold at auction after a preservation group's application for it was rejected.
  • January 22. Restoration work at Ontario's Point Clark Lighthouse will continue through summer 2012.
  • January 21. In Portishead, England, a local preservation trust has assumed ownership of the Blacknore Point Light.
  • January 21. In Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, the city council has voted to take ownership of the Brighton Beach Range Front Light.
  • January 21. The U.S. National Park Service is launching a $7 million project to restore or repair five of the Apostle Islands lighthouses in Wisconsin.
  • January 19. In Ireland, Clare County Council has agreed to open the historic Loop Head Lighthouse beginning summer 2012.
  • January 19. The light at Oregon's Heceta Head Light has been extinguished for a two-year restoration project, but the grounds have been reopened.
  • January 16. A new preservation group aims to save the Panmure Island Light in Prince Edward Island.
  • January 15. Georgia's Tybee Island Light is closing for a month for interior painting.
  • January 14. Thieves broke into the Roker Light at Sunderland, England, and stole the historic brass railing from the stairway.
  • January 10. In Wisconsin, the Appleton Yacht Club is completing a new lighthouse on the Fox River.

Faro di Otranto
Faro di Capo d'Otranto (La Palascia), Puglia, Italy, May 2010
photo copyright Egidio Ferrighi; used by permission

About this site
Founded in 1999 (during the relocation of North Carolina's Cape Hatteras lighthouse), the Lighthouse Directory is a tool for research and study concerning lighthouses and efforts to preserve those lighthouses. The Directory provides a brief compilation of basic data for each lighthouse with links to other reliable information available on the Internet. With the addition of the Hainan page in February 2009, listings now cover the entire world. However, this doesn't mean the Directory is complete, because new information continues to come to light.

I'm glad to hear from site visitors, especially if you have lighthouse news or photos of rarely-visited lighthouses.

The Directory has over 30,000 links, and all of them were appropriate and legitimate when they were added. Occasionally, because a web site is hacked or a URL is captured, a link leads not to legitimate information but to an inappropriate site, such as a source of pornography or malicious software. Please let me know if this happens, and I will remove the offending link immediately.

This site is hosted by my employer, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Suratkal Light
Suratkal Light, Mangalore, Karnatake, India, April 2008
Flickr Creative Commons photo by abhisawa

What is a lighthouse?
It is not so easy to define exactly what we mean by a lighthouse, and various organizations and individuals have used very different definitions when describing or classifying lighthouses. Clearly, all lighthouses are lighted aids to navigation, but not all lighted aids are considered to be lighthouses.

Some definitions are not controversial. An aid to navigation is a structure placed on or near navigable water to provide visual guidance to mariners. A beacon is an aid to navigation that is fixed in place (that is, not floating). A lighted beacon or lightbeacon is a beacon displaying a light, while an unlit beacon is called a daybeacon. Often, a lighted beacon is simply called a light.

In this Directory, a lighthouse is a lightbeacon having a height of at least 4 meters (13 ft) and a cross-section, at the base, of at least 4 square meters (43 sq ft). This simple definition does not require that a lighthouse have any particular form or appearance. The structure of a lighthouse may be enclosed, partially enclosed, or completely open.

The Directory includes listings of certain lights and other sites of interest to lighthouse fans that aren't lighthouses by this definition. The titles of those listings are enclosed in square brackets [...]. In addition, lighthouses destroyed or demolished since 2000 continue to be listed; their names are preceded by a pound sign #.

Der M
Der Mäuseturm, Bremen, Germany, March 2010
anonymous Wikimedia Creative Commons photo

The lighthouse listings
Dates shown for lighthouses are the dates when the light was first displayed; this may be later than the construction date in some cases. A station establishment date, when listed, is the date when a light was first displayed at or near the same location. Data concerning the characteristics of lights comes mostly from the U.S. Coast Guard Light List for U.S. lighthouses and from the NGA List of Lights for lighthouses in other countries.

The focal plane height of a light is the height above the surface of the water at which the light is displayed. (The level of the water surface is usually "mean high water," the level at an average high tide.) In the listings, "focal plane" refers to the focal plane height. A lantern of a lighthouse is a room or structure that actually encloses the light.

The heights of the lighthouse towers themselves should be considered approximate. Different sources use different methods for measuring tower heights, and those heights may actually change due to changes in ground level at the base of the tower.

I have attempted to determine whether lighthouse sites and towers are open to the public. This information is inferred from whatever sources may be available; it is certainly not guaranteed. Please let me know if this information, or any information in the Directory, is incorrect.

Lighthouse listings are marked with ratings of zero to four stars based on the extent to which the light station is open to visitors. Check the ratings key to interpret these ratings.

Farol de Aveiro
Farol de Aveiro, Northern Portugal, February 2011
Wikimedia Creative Commons photo by Jorge Farinha

Articles about lighthouses:

Mys Peschanyy Light
Mys Peschanyy Light, Khabarovsk Krai, Russia, August 2010
Panoramio photo copyright Moneron; used by permission

Special Resources

Ocos Range Rear Light
Ocos Range Rear Light, Guatemala, May 2007
Panoramio photo copyright Anton Jensen; used by permission

Kagoshima New Harbor South Breakwater
Kagoshima New Harbor South Breakwater Light, Kagoshima, April 2008
contributed photo copyright Frédéric Faux; used by permission


Shchukinskiy Light, Kaliningrad, Russia, July 2011
Panoramio Creative Commons photo by Nirron

Farol da Berlenga
Farol da Berlenga, Northern Portugal, August 2008
anonymous Wikimedia Creative Commons photo

Regional, state, and local lighthouse preservation organizations are recognized on each U.S. state page. U.S. organizations interested in lighthouse preservation nationally are:

  • The American Lighthouse Foundation, based in Rockland, Maine. ALF encourages preservation efforts throughout the country and holds preservation leases on more than a dozen New England lighthouses.
  • The United States Lighthouse Society, formerly based in San Francisco, has moved to the Point No Point Lighthouse in Hansville, Washington. USLHS has chapters active in the Chesapeake area, Long Island, Oregon, and Washington, and has been active in supporting preservation in other areas as well. The Society also publishes a respected journal, The Keeper's Log.

Lighthouses on the Internet: A Researcher's Guide has replaced the list of links formerly on this page.

Isle Royale Light
Isle Royale Light, Western Upper Peninsula, Michigan, U.S.A., July 2004
Wikimedia Creative Commons photo by C.W. Bash

Faro di Santa Maria di Leuca
Faro di Santa Maria di Leuca, Puglia, Italy, August 2005
Flickr Creative Commons photo by Valentina Paggiarin
Lighthouses of the Americas

Northeastern United States

Southeastern United States

Midwestern United States

Western United States and U.S. Pacific Territories

U.S. Caribbean

Atlantic Canada and Greenland

Interior and Western Canada

Bermuda and the West Indies

Mexico and Central America

South America and Antarctica

Lighthouses of the Pacific and Indian Oceans, Australia, and Africa

Pacific Ocean

Australia

South Indian Ocean

Africa

Lighthouses of Europe

Britain and Ireland

France, Monaco and Switzerland

Spain and Portugal

Italy and Malta

Southeastern Europe

Belgium and Netherlands

Germany and Austria

Denmark, Faroes, and Iceland

Norway (listed south to north)

Sweden (listed south to north)

Poland, Baltic States, and Finland

Northwestern Russia (southwest to northeast)

Lighthouses of Asia

Western and Central Asia

Southwest Asia

India

Southeast Asia

Indonesia

China and Taiwan

Asiatic Russia

Korea (listed clockwise around the peninsula)

Japan (listed clockwise around the main islands)

R'as ibn Hani Light
Ra's ibn Hani Light, Latakia, Syria
Syrian Directorate of Ports photo

Thanks to:

Hundreds of lighthouse fans around the world have enriched this site with their assistance, information, suggestions, and corrections. For a long time I tried to maintain a list of these many friends and contacts, but it has grown too long (and too out of date) to display here. However, I must extend special thanks to Jeremy D'Entremont, Michel Forand, Ted Sarah, and Klaus Huelse, who have followed the development of the Directory for years. Each of them has contributed information and support in vital ways, and the Directory would be much less useful without their participation.

Formalities

Written by:

Russ Rowlett, Director,
Center for Mathematics and Science Education
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

You are welcome to email the author (rowlett@email.unc.edu) with comments and suggestions.

All material in The Lighthouse Directory is copyright 2012 by Russ Rowlett and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Some images are presented by permission of their copyright holders, as noted under the image.

Permission is granted to copy portions of the Directory for personal use and study, but all other rights are reserved. You are welcome to make links to this page or to any page of the Directory, provided you credit the source and do not present the work as your own.

Please do not copy the contents of any page of the Directory to another site. This is an infringement of copyright, and it also deprives your users of the benefit of improvements and corrections made to the page.

The information contained in the directory is as accurate as I can make it; please notify me if you find any errors. Neither the author nor the University of North Carolina assumes any liability for uses made of the information presented by this web site.