The Lighthouse Directory

Welcome to the Lighthouse Directory, which provides information and links for more than 9400 of the world's lighthouses. Latest update May 5, 2008. This week Belize and Honduras have new, separate pages. Micheal Leydet has contributed a rare photo of the Faro de Cardón in Corinto, Nicaragua. Abkhazia also has a separate page, and the page for the Republic of Georgia has been revised with two new photos. The pages for Virginia, South Australia, Poland's Baltic Coast, and Northeastern Hokkaido have also been revised and updated. Last week there was a new page for Turkmenistan, illustrated by a photo contributed by Oleg Storozhenko, and the pages for Maryland, Victoria, Poland: Swinoujscie and the Odra, Azerbaijan, and Russia's Pacific Coast were revised, with several new photos and many new photo links and satellite views

Cape Jaffa Light
Cape Jaffa Light, South Australia, December 2007
anonymous Creative Commons photo

Hot Lighthouse News:

Check out Sue Clark's new website Lighthouse News for a comprehensive collection of lighthouse news items.

New Cape Henry Lighthouse
1881 Cape Henry Light, Virginia, U.S.A., April 2007
anonymous Creative Commons photo

About this site
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. Listings now cover all of the world except for parts of Korea and China; those countries will be completed soon.

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

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

Searching the site: Many users have requested a search function, but I don't know of a search service that will work only inside a folder within a university site. If you're looking for a specific lighthouse and don't know exactly what page it is on, you can usually find it through Google by searching on two phrases inside quotes: "lighthouse directory" and "[put lighthouse name here]". For example, if you're looking for the Phare de Kermorvan in France, search on "lighthouse directory" and "kermorvan".

Monbetsu Light
Monbetsu Light, Northern Hokkaido, Japan
Japanese Coast Guard photo

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 recently destroyed or demolished continue to be listed; their names are preceded by a pound sign #.

Pitsunda Light
Pitsunda Light, Abkhazia, June 2004
Creative Commons photo copyright Vyacheslav Stepanyuchenko

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.

Batumi Light
Batumi Light, Republic of Georgia, May 2006
Creative Commons photo by Gilad Rom

Articles about lighthouses:

Darlowo Light
Darlowo Light, Poland's Baltic Coast
Urzad Morski w Slupsku photo

Special Resources

Faro de Cardón
Faro de Cardón, Corinto, Nicaragua, May 2007
photo copyright Michael Leydet; used by permission

Faro de Roatan
Faro de Roatan, Honduras, January 2008
Creative Commons photo by Paul Nicholson

English Caye Light
English Caye Light, Belize
photo courtesy of Let's Go Sailing; used by permission
Lighthouses of the Americas

Northeastern United States

Southeastern United States

Midwestern United States

Western United States and U.S. Pacific Territories

U.S. Caribbean

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

British Isles

France, Monaco and Switzerland

Spain and Portugal

Italy and Malta

Southeastern Europe

Northern Europe

Denmark, Faroes, and Iceland

Norway

Sweden

Lighthouses of Asia

Western and Central Asia

South and Southwest Asia

Southeast Asia

China and Taiwan (under construction)

Korea and Russian Far East

Japan

Far de Salou
Far de Cap de Salou, Catalonia, Spain, December 2006
Creative Commons photo by lightkeeper Mas Terry, posted by C.W. Bash

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 Wells, 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, based in San Francisco. 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 at this location.

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 2008 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.