The Lighthouse Directory

Welcome to the Lighthouse Directory, providing information and links for more than 24,600 of the world's lighthouses. Follow the Directory's new Bluesky feed (@lhdirectory.bsky.social) for the latest in lighthouse news and Directory updates. Latest update August 16, 2025.

This week the pages for Eastern Scotland in the U.K., Gibraltar, Westtern Andalusia in Spain, Poland's Baltic Coast, Southern Tunisia, West Bengal in India, Central Québec in Canada, Southeastern Pennsylvania and Delaware in the U.S.A., Bahia in Brazil, the Nordfjord district in Vestland County of Norway, Miyazaki Prefecture in Japan, the Republic of Georgia, Northern Sulawesi in Indonesia, the Sakha Republic in Russia,and the Heuksan Islands of Sinan County in South Korea have been checked and revised with improved information and many new photos.

The Directory's pages for Ukraine describe the lighthouses as they existed before the start of the current conflict between Ukraine and Russia. Russian-occupied territories in Ukraine, including Crimea, are identified provisionally as East Ukraine.

Also in the Directory: A Checklist of Lightships in the world. Included are some 127 ships surviving, restored, abandoned, or recently scrapped.

Special thanks this week to Nishan for comments on lighthouses in Sri Lanka and to FoxyFan13 for news of a lighthouse removed in Denmark.

GOOGLE SITE SEARCH (of ibiblio.org; include the word "lighthouse" in your search)

 


Toi Misaki Light, Kushima, Miyazaki, Japan, Maay 2022
Google Maps photo by marumon 0511

A Month of Lighthouse News:

  • August 17. Volunteers from places as far away as Saskatchewan and North Carolina are coming for a three-week work party repairing the Peter Island Lighthouse in Nova Scotia.
  • August 16. Teams from the San Juan Islands Youth Conservation Corps replace windows and carry out needed repairs at the Patos Island Lighthouse in northwestern Washington.
  • August 15. The Cana Island Lighthouse in Wisconsin, battered by recent storms, has reopened to visitors while cleanup of damage on the island continues.
  • August 14. The annual fish fry dinner fundraiser for the Ashtabula Lighthouse in Ohio will be this Saturday, August 16. Volunteers have worked for years and made progress on restoring this 1905 lighthouse, but more work is needed.
  • August 14. Also this Saturday, August 16, ceremonies and activities will mark the 135th anniversary of the Cape Meares Lighthouse in Oregon.
  • August 13. The online auction of the Penfield Reef Lighthouse in Connecticut has been extended to next Wednesday, August 20. One bid, at the $100,000 minimum, has bee received.
  • August 13. n a foggy dawn operation a crane has returned the lantern of the Yaquina Bay Lighthouse in Oregon to its place atop the building.
  • August 12. Severe storms in Wisconsin flood the surroundings of the Cana Island Lighthouse, blowing down 30% of the island's trees and stranding staff and visitors on the island.
  • August 9. The National Park Service will begin this month a complete restoration of the Cape Lookout Lighthouse in North Carolina. Stone and Lime Historic Restoration Services is the lead contractor for the project, estimated to take two to three years.
  • August 7. The General Services Administration auction of the Penfield Reef Lighthouse in Connecticut is scheduled to end August 12, but so far no bids have been received. The minimum bid is $100,000. This is the fourth time the government has tried to sell this lighthouse.
  • August 7. Neenah, Wisconsin, officials have launched a community campaign to raise at least half of the estimated $565,000 needed to restore and preserve the Kimberly Point Lighthouse, one of several lighthouses on Lake Winnebago.
  • August 5. The Essex National Heritage Commission has completed a $30,000 project to restore and repoint brickwork inside the Bakers Island Lighthouse in Salem harbor, Massachusetts. The brick chimneys of the keepers' houses were also restored.
  • August 4. Lighthouse Picnics, a popular business at the Ferryland Lighthouse south of St. John, Newfoundland, is back in operation after repairs of damage to the light station caused by Hurricane Larry back in 2021.
  • August 3. The St. Simons Island Lighthouse near Brunswick, Georgia, is back in operation after being disabled by a lightning strike on July 10, the second such strike this summer.
  • August 3. Major restoration at the Eagle Bluff Lighthouse in Door County, Wisconsin, is on track to finish his fall. In addition to work inside the lighthouse the summer kitchen has been rebuilt and the barn is being converted to a visitor center for the lighthouse.
  • August 2. Tours of the Alki Point Lighthouse in Seattle, Washington, have been suspended for the season after testing showed higher lead levels in the tower than had been found previously.
  • August 1. A festival event will be held Sunday at the 1833 Buffalo Lighthouse in New York. During the event the replica Fresnel lens of the lighthouse will be reinstalled following some repairs to its center section.
  • August 1. A painter discovered a message in a bottle hidden in a wall of the Cape Bruny Lighthouse in Tasmania. The message described repair work being done on the lighthouse in 1903.
  • July 31 Scaffolding is gone as the exterior restoration of the Hunting Island Lighthouse in South Carolina is complete. Interior work continues but the lighthouse should reopen late this year or early next year.
  • July 31. The Grindle Point Lighthouse in Islesboro, Maine, is open for the first time in six years following a $228,000 restoration project. Some work continues but the lighthouse and the museum in the keeper's house are open Friday through Sunday until Labor Day.
  • July 30. In Oregon the Coquille River Lighthouse Keepers Foundation schedules a Save the Lighthouse fundnraiser event on Saturday, August 9 to raise funds for urgently needed repairs to the steps and railings of the Coquille River Lighthouse.
  • July 30. The Pointe aux Barques Lighthouse in southeast Michigan is holding its annual Heritage Festival on Saturday. Featured this year: the steam whistle from the ship Iron Chief, which wrecked near the lighthouse in 1904, has been restored and will be sounded.
  • July 29. Near Hull in eastern England, the Yorkshire Wildlife Trust is seeking volunteers to conduct guided tours of the 1895 Spurn High Lighthouse.
  • July 27. Lake Erie Lights of Pennsylvania, which manages the Presque Isle and Erie Land Lighthouses, is now the new steward of the 1857 Erie North Pier Lighthouse as well.
  • July 26. On Block Island, Rhode Island, the Southeast Lighthouse Foundation will hold a Full Moon Party and silent art auction Saturday, August 9, to kick off fundraising to restore half of the duplex keeper's quarters, completing the restoration of the light station.
  • July 26. The Friends of the Portsmouth Harbor Lighthouse in New Hampshire need to rase $100,000 to rebuild the footbridge to the lighthouse, damaged by winter storms during the last several years. They plan a kickoff for the campaign August 7, National Lighthouse Day.
  • July 25. A new preservation group, the Friends of the Point Vicente Lighthouse, has formed to work for restoration of this sadly neglected Southern California lighthouse. Here is their new website: https://friendsofpvlighthouse.org
  • July 24. The East Brother Lighthouse, operating as a B&B in San Pablo Bay, California, is launching a drive to find $750,000 needed for repairs to its pier and gangway.
  • July 23. At the Au Sable Lighthouse in Upper Michigan a National Park Service project is using traditional methods and materials to replace deteriorated plaster inside the keeper's house.
  • July 21. In Alicante Province on Spain's east coast, the Santa Pola Town Council is improving the road that provides visitor access to the Santa Pola Lighthouse.
  • July 19. The North Manitou Light Keepers, who manage the lighthouse in northern Lake Huron, Michigan, will host its annual Lightkeeper Rally and Crib Cruise on Aug. 7, aligning the celebration with National Lighthouse Day.
  • July 19. On Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts, some Aquinnah residents are dissatisfied with the new LED beacon at the historic Gay Head Lighthouse.
  • July 18. At the St. John's Point Lighthouse in County Down, Northern Ireland, preservationists are protesting plans to replace the existing lamp with an LED lamp and remove the mercury-bath rotating system. The Fresnel lens will be retained and will still rotate.


Poti Light, Poti, Georgia, April 2024
Google Maps photo by Péter Csizmadia

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. Since the addition of the Hainan page in February 2009 listings 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 ibiblio.org, one of the largest free information databases online, maintained as a public service of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.


Manado Light, Manado, North Sulawesi, Indonesia, November 2012
Flickr photo copyright Walter Mosca; used by permission

Definitions: What is a lighthouse?
To begin with some basics, an aid to navigation or navaid 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.

Everyone agrees that a lighthouse is a lightbeacon that is, in some sense, a substantial building. There is some diagreement among lighthouse fans as to whether there should be restrictions on the design of the building, but standard dictionaries in English all have some form of this simple definition: "A lighthouse is a tower carrying a light to guide mariners." Indeed, in many languages the word for a lighthouse translates literally as "light tower" or "fire tower." The Directory adopts this definition: a lighthouse is a tower, at least 4 m (13 ft) tall and more substantial in cross section than a post, mast, or pillar, carrying or designed originally to carry a light to guide mariners.

Many lighthouses are enclosed buildings with walls of stone, brick, wood, concrete, metal, or modern composite materials. Many others are open skeletal (framework) towers of cast iron, steel, or wood. The light at the top of some lighthouses is housed in an enclosed lantern, but many lighthouses have the light exposed with no lantern. Historically lighthouses were powered with a variety of fuels, but today nearly all are solar powered.

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 the hashtag #.

A light station is a collection of buildings including a lighthouse, staff quarters, and supporting structures such as a fog signal building housing a foghorn or fogbell, a boathouse, an oil house to store fuel for the light, and so on. A century ago all lighthouses required lightkeepers to maintain and operate the light, fog signal, and other equipment. Today practically all aids to navigation operate automatically, but some light stations have resident caretakers, still called keepers, to maintain the property and guard against vandalism.


Ostrov Muostakh Light, Tiksi, Sakha Republic, Russia, summer 2012
photo copyright Dr. Thomas Opel; used by permission

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 (colors and flash patterns) of lights comes mostly from the U.S. Coast Guard Light List for U.S. lighthouses and from the U.S. NGA List of Lights or available national light lists 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 tower heights of the lighthouses 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.


Inner Breakwater Light, Daeheuksando, Sinan, South Korea, December 2013
Yeonhap News photo


Inchkeith Light, Pettycur, Fife, Scotland, U.K., August 2019
Google Maps street view by Craig Muirhead

Articles about lighthouses:

Online Light Lists

Online Navigation Charts

Special Resources


Cabo Trafalgar Light, Barbate, Andalusia, Spain, October 2021
Google Maps photo by Teresa González


Niechorze Light, Niechorze, West Pomerania, Poland, June 2020
Instagram photo by swiatpodlupapl


Ra's Taguerness Light, Djerba, Tunisia, March 2023
Google Maps photo by Pascal Nexon


Tajpur Light, Tajpur, West Bengal, India, October 2020
Google Maps photo by ripon sk

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, and has a large collection of historic light lists of U.S. lighthouses.

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


Cap au Saumon Light, Saint-Siméon, Québec, Canada, September 2021
Instagram photo by Johanne DesChesnes


Fenwick Island Light, Fenwick Island, Delaware, U.S.A., October 2019
Google Maps street view

Santo Antônio da Barra Light, Salvador, Bahia, Brazil, June 2024
Google Maps photo
by Vitor D'Agnoluzzo


Kråkenes Light, Vågsøy, Vestland, Norway, May 2024
Google Maps photo by Juergen Wetendorf


Turtle Rock Light, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S.A., August 2023
Gogle Maps street view


Liston Range Rear Light, Port Penn, Delaware, U.S.A., May 2018
Google Maps photo by Ken Nichols


Isle of May High Light, Fife, Scotland, U.K., May 2021
Instagram photo by Serge Caredda

Lighthouses of the Americas

Northeastern United States

Southeastern United States and U.S. Caribbean

Midwestern United States

Western United States and U.S. Pacific Territories

Atlantic Canada and St. Pierre

Interior and Western Canada

Bermuda and the West Indies

Mexico

Central America

South America, Antarctica, South Atlantic Ocean

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

New Zealand and Pacific Islands

Australia

Indian Ocean

Africa

Lighthouses of Europe

Britain and Ireland

France and Monaco

Spain and Portugal

Italy and Malta

Southeastern Europe

Southwestern Russia and Ukraine

Belgium and Netherlands

 

Germany

Inland Central Europe

Denmark, Faroes, Iceland, and Greenland

Norway (listed south to north)

Sweden (listed south to north)

Poland and the Baltic States

Finland

Northwestern Russia (listed southwest to northeast)

Lighthouses of Asia

Mediterranean Sea, Black Sea and Caspian Sea

Arabia, Iran and Pakistan

India

Southeast Asia

Philippines

Indonesia

China and Taiwan

Korea (listed clockwise around the peninsula)

Japan (listed clockwise around the main islands)

Asiatic Russia


Europa Point Light, Gibraltar, May 2024
Instagram photo by paulina_gniadpa

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 recognize the late Michel Forand for his suggestions and corrections touching essentially every page of this work, and extend thanks to Jeremy D'Entremont, Ted Sarah, Klaus Huelse, and Andreas Köhler, who have followed the development of the Directory for years. More recently Jim Smith has read nearly every page carefully, correcting errors and suggesting useful additions. Each of them has contributed information and support in vital ways, and the Directory would be much less useful without their participation.

In addition to Michel Forand, I want to recognize the contributions of two other experts on lighthouse history who have passed in recent years: Terry Pepper, the Executive Director of the Great Lakes Lighthouse Keepers Association (GLLKA), and Tim Harrison, the founding editor of Lighthouse Digest magazine. Both made useful and supportive comments on the Directory.

Formalities

Written by:

Russ Rowlett, Retired Adjunct Professor of Mathematics and Professor of 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 2025 by Russ Rowlett and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Many 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. Everyone has permission to link to this page or to any page of the Directory.

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.