Welcome to the Lighthouse Directory, providing information and links for more than 24,300 of the world's lighthouses. Follow the Directory's X (ex-Twitter) feed for the latest in lighthouse news and Directory updates. Latest update September 30, 2023.
This week the pages for Western Finistère in France, Southwest Finland, Iraq, Kuwait, Ecuador, Saskatchewan and Alberta in Canada, Hawaii in the U.S.A., Northern Troms County in Norway, Awaji Shima in Hyōgo Prefecture of Japan, Bulgaria, Shànghǎi in China, Sumbawa in Indonesia, Northern Gangwon Province in South Korea, and the inland U.S. states of West Virgina, Kentucky, and Tennessee have been checked and revised with improved information and several 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. No changes in the descriptions will be made until there is a stable agreement that stops the fighting. 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 Heather Craven for photos and information on the lighthouses of New Caledonia, to Andreas Köhler for reports from lighthouses in northern Spain, to FoxyFan13 for news concerning the Portage River lighthouse in Michigan, and to Jim Smith for his comments on last week's revisions.
A Month of Lighthouse News:
About this site 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. What is a lighthouse? 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. Everyone agrees that a lighthouse is a lightbeacon that is, in some sense, a substantial building. Small lightbeacons such as masts, solid pillars, or small cabinets are usually not considered to be lighthouses. In this Directory, the guideline is that a lighthouse should have 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 guideline 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 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. Tzhe lighthouse listings 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.
Articles about lighthouses:
Special Resources
Regional, state, and local lighthouse preservation organizations are recognized on each U.S. state page. U.S. organizations interested in lighthouse preservation nationally are:
Lighthouses on the Internet: A Researcher's Guide has replaced the list of links formerly on this page.
![]() Le Stiff Light, Île d'Ouessant, Finistère, France, August 2014 Wikimedia Creative Commons photo by Yann Caradec ![]() Grand Port East Breakwater Light, Al Faw, Iraq, August 2020 Reuters photo distribued by Iraqi government
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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
New Zealand and Pacific Islands Australia Indian Ocean Africa
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)
Mediterranean Sea, Black Sea and Caspian Sea Arabia, Iran and Pakistan India Southeast Asia Philippines Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, and Timor Leste China and Taiwan Korea (listed clockwise around the peninsula) Japan (listed clockwise around the main islands) Asiatic Russia |
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 Exceultive 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, Adjunct Professor of Mathematics and Retired 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 2023 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.