The Lighthouse Directory

Welcome to the Lighthouse Directory, which provides information and links for more than 12,800 of the world's lighthouses. Latest update August 30, 2010. This week the page for China's island province of Hainan has been expanded with several new listings and photos. The pages for Northeastern England, Fyn and Langeland in Denmark, Mayotte, Comoros, Ecuador, and the Volga, Don and Caspian lighthouses of Russia have been checked and revised, with a number of new photos added.

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Spurn Point High Light
Spurn Point High Light, East Yorkshire, Northeastern England
photo copyright Ian Britton; used by permission

A Month of Lighthouse News:

  • August 30. The Latimer Reef Lighthouse in Long Island Sound, New York, has been sold to an unknown buyer for $225,000.
  • August 30. Repeated vandalism may force the Coast Guard to close access to the pierhead lighthouse in Manitowoc, Wisconsin.
  • August 21. The Point Abino Light keeper's house in Ontario is for sale for $899,000 to raise funds to restore the lighthouse.
  • August 21. Restoration will begin this fall at the Fort Gratiot Light in Port Huron, Michigan.
  • August 20. Prince Edward Island's East Point Light has reopened with new and expanded visitor facilities.
  • August 14. The Borden Flats Light in Falls River, Massachusetts, has been sold a second time at auction, but the first buyer has sued to stop the new sale.
  • August 11. The exterior of Ontario's Point Clark Lighthouse is crumbling, and the $495,000 allocated for restoration may not be enough for repairs.
  • August 8. Thanks to £380,000 in grants, the Bona Lighthouse on Scotland's Loch Ness will be restored as a bed and breakfast inn.
  • August 6. New Jersey's beleaguered Ludlum Beach Light will be demolished in September, barring last-minute funding to move it.
  • July 30. The surviving base of Mississippi's Round Island Light has arrived onshore for restoration.

Guanyinjiao Light
Guanyinjiao Light, Danzhou, Hainan, China
PRC Maritime Safety Administration photo

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 by 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.

Bågø Fyr
Bågø Fyr, Assens, Fyn and Langeland, Denmark, October 2005
Wikimedia public domain photo by Ove Jensen

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 #.

Volga-Don Canal East Entrance Light
Volga-Don Canal East Entrance Light, Volgograd
Volga, Don, and Caspian, Russia
photo copyright vetert.ru; non-commerical use permitted with attribution

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 of a light is the height above the surface of the water at which the light is displayed. 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.

Faro de Manta
Faro de Manta, Ecuador, March 2008
photo copyright Dave Nelson; used by permission

Articles about lighthouses:

Souter Light
Souter Light, South Tyneside, Northeastern England, July 2007
Creative Commons photo by Craig Wilkinson

Special Resources

Yinggezui Light
Yinggezui Light, Ledong County, Hainan, China
PRC Maritime Safety Administration photo

Moroni Light
Moroni Light, Grande Comore, Comoros
Service des Phares et Balises photo courtesy of Michel Forand

Strib Fyr
Strib Fyr, Middelfart, Fyn and Langeland, Denmark
photo copyright Malte Werning; used by permission

Fish Quay Old Light
Fish Quay Old Light, North Shields, Northeastern England, July 2007
Geograph Creative Commons photo by Steve Fareham

Regional, state, and local lighthouse preservation organizations are recognized on each 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.

Yulin Jiao Light
Yulinjiao Light, Dongfang, Hainan, China, May 2006
Creative Commons photo by David Schroeter

Helnæs Fyr
Helnæs Fyr, Assens, Fyn and Langeland, Denmark, October 2004
anonymous Creative Commons photo
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

Northern Europe

Denmark, Faroes, and Iceland

Norway (listed south to north)

Sweden (listed south to north)

Lighthouses of Asia

Western and Central Asia

Southwest Asia

India

Southeast Asia

Indonesia

China and Taiwan

Russian Far East

Korea (listed clockwise around the peninsula)

Japan (listed clockwise around the main islands)

Great Volga Light
Bol'shoy Volzhskiy Light, Moscow Canal Northern Entrance, Dubna
Volga, Don, and Caspian, Russia, July 2008
Panoramio Creative Commons photo by Andrey Zakharov

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 2010 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.