The Most Beautiful Lighthouses in the World
26 places in 14 countries · updated 14 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful lighthouses in the world are Tower of Hercules (Spain), Maiden's Tower (Turkey) and Chania Lighthouse (Greece). The list covers 26 lighthouses in 14 countries. France has the most, with 5. Last updated 14 October 2026.
A lighthouse is a tower whose whole purpose is to be seen, and the finest ones are as legible by day as by night. Bands of colour, a lantern of brass and glass, a granite shaft rising out of the surf or a white cylinder on a cliff edge: each was designed to stand out against one particular coast. Isolation, weather and the light itself give them a presence few buildings of their size possess.
This collection runs from antiquity to the age of steel. The Tower of Hercules at A Coruña is a Roman lighthouse still in service, and the Chania Lighthouse guards the old Venetian harbour of Crete. Lindau's lighthouse stands at the entrance to a harbour on Lake Constance, opposite a stone Bavarian lion. On the American coast, Portland Head Light in Maine dates from 1791, Split Rock watches over Lake Superior, and Cape Hatteras, with its black-and-white spiral, was moved inland in 1999 to escape the eroding shore. Off Brittany, La Jument stands in some of the roughest waters in Europe.
The lighthouses were chosen for how they look and are ordered by beauty. Each has its own text, a photograph credited to its author and a point on the map; the section also opens country by country on separate pages.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | Country | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Tower of Hercules | Fortified tower | Spain | ✓ |
| 2 | Maiden's Tower | Lighthouse | Turkey | |
| 3 | Chania Lighthouse | Lighthouse | Greece | |
| 4 | Cordouan Lighthouse | Lighthouse | France | ✓ |
| 5 | Heceta Head Light | Lighthouse | United States | |
| 6 | Lindau Lighthouse | Lighthouse | Germany | |
| 7 | Saint-Mathieu Lighthouse | Lighthouse | France | |
| 8 | Ploumanac'h Lighthouse | Lighthouse | France | |
| 9 | Les Eclaireurs Lighthouse | Lighthouse | Argentina | |
| 10 | Beachy Head Lighthouse | Lighthouse | United Kingdom | |
| 11 | South Stack Lighthouse | Lighthouse | United Kingdom | |
| 12 | Split Rock Lighthouse | Lighthouse | United States | |
| 13 | Aniva Lighthouse | Lighthouse | Russia | |
| 14 | Tour de la Lanterne | Lighthouse | France | |
| 15 | Pemaquid Point Light | Lighthouse | United States | |
| 16 | Tourlitis Lighthouse | Lighthouse | Greece | |
| 17 | Peggys Point Lighthouse | Lighthouse | Canada | |
| 18 | Cape Hatteras Lighthouse | Lighthouse | United States | |
| 19 | Formentor Lighthouse | Lighthouse | Spain | |
| 20 | Portland Head Light | Lighthouse | United States | |
| 21 | La Jument Lighthouse | Lighthouse | France | |
| 22 | La Corbière lighthouse | Lighthouse | Jersey | |
| 23 | Nazaré Lighthouse | Lighthouse | Portugal | |
| 24 | Fanad Head Lighthouse | Lighthouse | Ireland | |
| 25 | Neist Point Lighthouse | Lighthouse | United Kingdom | |
| 26 | Kallur Lighthouse | Lighthouse | Faroe Islands |
01 Tower of Hercules
Torre de Hércules
Spain · 6.3 km from A Coruña43.386° N 8.406° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
Luis Miguel Bugallo Sánchez (Lmbuga) · CC BY-SA 3.0 There were dozens of lighthouses like this one once, scattered around the edges of the Roman world. There is exactly one left that still works. The Tower of Hercules, built or substantially rebuilt during the reign of Trajan in the early second century AD, has been guiding ships into what's now A Coruña for roughly nineteen centuries, and it is both the oldest lighthouse in the world still in active service and the only Roman one still doing the job it was built for. Its original name, Farum Brigantium, borrowed directly from pharos, the Greek word that also named the famous lighthouse at Alexandria — a deliberate echo, from one wonder to another.
Did you know? A cornerstone at the base names the designer, Gaius Sevius Lupus, an architect from Aeminium, today's Coimbra in Portugal, who dedicated the work to Mars.
02 Maiden's Tower
Kız Kulesi
Turkey · 2.5 km from Istanbul41.021° N 29.004° E
Image by Ben_Kerckx from Pixabay The Maiden's Tower stands on a tiny islet in the Bosphorus, about 200 metres off the Asian shore at Üsküdar, where the strait opens into the Sea of Marmara. It has watched ships pass for well over two thousand years: an Athenian commander is thought to have set up a customs post here around 408 BC, and in 1110 the Byzantine emperor Alexios Komnenos built a tower on the rock, linked, it is said, by a chain to the European shore.
Did you know? Its old Greek name, Leander's Tower, borrows a myth actually set far away on the Dardanelles, where Leander swam nightly to his lover Hero.
03 Chania Lighthouse
Φάρος Χανίων
Greece · 0.8 km from Chania35.519° N 24.017° E
Image by cray666 from Pixabay The lighthouse of Chania stands at the entrance to the old Venetian harbour, a stone masonry tower that closes the view along the waterfront of this Cretan port. It rises about 26 m above the bay, with a gallery and lantern at the top.
Did you know? The tower rises in three stages, an octagonal base, a sixteen-sided middle and a round top, which gives it the look of a slender minaret.
04 Cordouan Lighthouse
France45.586° N 1.173° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
Rémih · CC BY-SA 4.0 Cordouan stands on a reef about seven kilometres out to sea at the mouth of the Gironde, the estuary that carried Bordeaux's wine to the world. That trade is the reason it exists: by the late sixteenth century an older medieval tower on the rock had crumbled, ships were being lost, and the crown commissioned something far more ambitious. Work began in 1584 and finished in 1611, which makes Cordouan the oldest lighthouse in France and one of the few anywhere built as much to impress as to warn.
Did you know? The contract for the lighthouse was signed on 2 March 1584 in the presence of the essayist Michel de Montaigne, then mayor of Bordeaux.
05 Heceta Head Light
United States44.137° N 124.128° W
Image by ArtTower from Pixabay Heceta Head Light stands on a forested headland above the Pacific on the central Oregon coast, its white tower set on a ledge some 205 feet above the surf. The headland is named after Bruno de Heceta, the Spanish navigator who explored this coast in the late eighteenth century. Construction began in 1892 with a crew of 56, and the light was first lit in 1894.
Did you know? Its Fresnel lens contains 640 two-inch-thick prisms arranged in eight bull's-eye panels, made in Birmingham, England.
06 Lindau Lighthouse
Leuchtturm Lindau
Germany · 6.9 km from Bregenz47.543° N 9.684° E
Image by maxmann from Pixabay Lindau's lighthouse stands at the end of the western breakwater of the harbour of Lindau island, facing the Bavarian Lion on the opposite mole, and the two together form one of the most photographed harbour entrances on Lake Constance. It is the only lighthouse in Bavaria and the southernmost in Germany. Because the lake itself lies high, its light also burns at the greatest altitude of any in the country, some 428 metres above sea level.
Did you know? The white flash is switched on by radio signals sent from ships approaching the harbour, rather than shining unattended all night.
07 Saint-Mathieu Lighthouse
Phare de Saint-Mathieu
France · 21.5 km from Brest48.330° N 4.771° W
JackyM59 · CC BY-SA 4.0 Few lighthouses stand in company as strange as Saint-Mathieu's. The white tower with its red crown rises straight out of the ruined nave of a Benedictine abbey on the Pointe Saint-Mathieu, the cliff-edged headland at the western tip of Brittany where the Iroise sea meets the approaches to Brest. Beside it are a naval signal station and a memorial to French sailors lost at sea, so that one short walk takes in eight centuries of the coast's relationship with the sea.
Did you know? The light has a range of about 29 nautical miles, roughly 55 km, and flashes white once every 15 seconds.
08 Ploumanac'h Lighthouse
Phare de Ploumanac'h
France48.837° N 3.483° W
Image by ykaiavu from Pixabay The Ploumanac'h lighthouse, officially the Mean Ruz light, stands at the heart of one of the most extraordinary coastlines in France, the Côte de Granit Rose in northern Brittany. Here the shore is a chaos of enormous pink granite boulders, rounded and hollowed by wind and sea into shapes that locals have named for what they suggest: Napoleon's hat, the tortoise, the three brothers. The lighthouse is built of the same stone and seems to grow from the rocks; the Breton name Mean Ruz means simply "red stone".
Did you know? The interior of the lighthouse is decorated with mosaics by Isidore Odorico, a mosaicist from Rennes.
09 Les Eclaireurs Lighthouse
Faro Les Éclaireurs
Argentina · 17.2 km from Ushuaia54.872° S 68.083° W
Ricardo Martins · CC BY 2.0 Les Eclaireurs Lighthouse is a small tower with an outsized setting. It stands on the northeasternmost of a cluster of bare rocky islets in the Beagle Channel, about five nautical miles east of Ushuaia, with the mountains of Tierra del Fuego rising around it. The tower is only 11 metres high — a stout brick cylinder painted red with a broad white band, topped by a black lantern and a gallery — but set on its dark rock in the middle of the channel, with cold water and big skies all around, it has become the defining image of the far south of Argentina.
Did you know? The islets were named Les Éclaireurs, French for the scouts, by naval officer Louis-Ferdinand Martial, who led the French scientific expedition aboard La Romanche in 1882–83.
10 Beachy Head Lighthouse
United Kingdom · 30.9 km from Brighton50.734° N 0.241° E
Image by diego_torres from Pixabay Few lighthouses are seen the way this one is: from above. Beachy Head Lighthouse stands in the sea at the foot of the highest chalk sea cliff in Britain, a sheer white wall some 162 metres tall, and most people meet it by walking to the cliff edge and looking down. From there the tower is a small red-and-white column set against the blue-green shallows. The contrast of scale — a 33-metre granite tower dwarfed by the headland behind it — is the whole picture.
Did you know? It was the last wave-washed masonry lighthouse that Trinity House ever built, completed just as the age of granite rock towers came to an end.
11 South Stack Lighthouse
United Kingdom53.307° N 4.699° W
Image by dp1616 from Pixabay South Stack Lighthouse stands on its own small island off the western tip of Holy Island, Anglesey, separated from the mainland cliffs by a narrow, restless channel of sea about 30 metres wide. The setting does most of the work: sheer cliffs rising some 60 metres from the water, and a white tower with its keepers' buildings perched on a rock known in Welsh as Ynys Lawd. The approach is part of the experience — a flight of roughly 400 steps zigzagging down the cliff face to a footbridge across the gap, and the same steps back up again.
Did you know? Before the first bridge was built in 1828, people crossed to the island in a basket hung from a hemp cable.
12 Split Rock Lighthouse
United States47.200° N 91.368° W
Image by MikeGoad from Pixabay Split Rock Lighthouse stands at the edge of a 133-foot cliff above Lake Superior, a tower that seems to grow out of the dark rock of the North Shore. Seen from the shoreline below or from the headlands to either side, the scene looks more like a sea coast than a lake: sheer cliffs, forested ridges, and water stretching to the horizon. The tower itself is only 54 feet high; it is the cliff that gives it its presence.
Did you know? The rotating Fresnel lens floats on a bath of liquid mercury, letting the heavy glass assembly turn almost without friction.
13 Aniva Lighthouse
Russia46.019° N 143.414° E
Yaroslav Shuraev · CC BY-SA 4.0 Aniva Lighthouse stands on Sivuchya, a lone rock off Cape Aniva, the south-eastern tip of Sakhalin, where Aniva Bay opens toward the La Pérouse Strait and the cold North Pacific. It is one of the most haunting buildings on any coast: a round concrete tower banded in white and black, rising from a broad base that clings to the rock, with nothing around it but surf, hidden reefs and the bare cliffs of the cape. Fog is frequent here and the currents are treacherous, and in that light the tower looks less like a working beacon than a ruined castle at sea.
Did you know? A lighthouse at Cape Aniva was first proposed in 1898 after a steamship sank nearby, but the rock was judged too hard to reach and the plan was dropped.
14 Tour de la Lanterne
France · 1.3 km from La Rochelle46.156° N 1.157° W
Pline · CC BY-SA 3.0 The tallest of the three medieval towers that guard the Old Port of La Rochelle, the Tour de la Lanterne is both an old harbour lighthouse and a former prison whose walls are covered in the carvings of its inmates. A massive round stone drum about 25 metres high is crowned by a slender octagonal Gothic spire, its ribs studded with crockets and its faces pierced by trefoil windows in the Flamboyant manner, bringing the whole structure to around 55 metres. A small stone lantern near the top once held the fire that guided ships in from the bay, and the spire itself served sailors as a daymark visible from far out at sea. Rabelais knew it: in the fifth book of his Pantagruel tales the giant sails into port by the light of the lantern of La Rochelle.
Did you know? The Tour de la Lanterne rises about 55 metres, making it the tallest of La Rochelle's three harbour towers.
15 Pemaquid Point Light
United States43.837° N 69.506° W
Dennis G. Jarvis · CC BY-SA 2.0 At Pemaquid Point the coast of Maine ends in great sloping ledges of banded grey rock that run down into the Atlantic like the tilted pages of a book, and on top of them stands a small white lighthouse. The combination of the rough shore, breaking surf and the neat tower above it has made Pemaquid one of the most painted and photographed lighthouses in New England; in 2003 it was chosen to appear on Maine's state quarter.
Did you know? The first lighthouse on the point was commissioned in 1827 under President John Quincy Adams.
16 Tourlitis Lighthouse
Τουρλίτης
Greece37.843° N 24.946° E
anjči · CC BY 2.0 A slim stone tower stands on a single sea-worn rock in the harbour of Chora, the main town of Andros, as if it had grown out of the stone. Steps cut into the rock lead up from the waterline to its door, and the whole outcrop is barely larger than the lighthouse it carries. The tower faces the ruined Venetian castle at the tip of the town's headland, about 200 metres away, and the pair have become the emblem of the island; few lighthouses anywhere sit so completely alone on their own pinnacle of rock.
Did you know? Tourlitis is often described as the first automated lighthouse in Greece; it has never needed a resident keeper on its cramped rock.
17 Peggys Point Lighthouse
Peggy's Point Lighthouse
Canada · 30.8 km from Halifax44.492° N 63.919° W
Image by lumix2004 from Pixabay Peggy's Point Lighthouse stands on a sweep of bare, pale granite at the mouth of St. Margarets Bay, on the Atlantic coast of Nova Scotia. The rock is the point of the place: huge smooth outcrops, rounded and polished by the ice sheets, scattered with boulders — glacial erratics — that the ice dragged from elsewhere and left behind when it melted. On this shelf of stone the small white lighthouse stands alone, the fishing village of Peggy's Cove tucked into the inlet behind it. It is widely described as one of the most photographed structures in Atlantic Canada.
Did you know? The first light here, in 1868, was a wooden house with a beacon on its roof: a kerosene lamp backed by a silver-plated mirror reflector.
18 Cape Hatteras Lighthouse
United States35.251° N 75.529° W
Image by 1778011 from Pixabay Rising from the low dunes of Hatteras Island, the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse is the tallest lighthouse in the United States, at about 210 feet from base to tip, and the tallest built of brick, with some 1.25 million bricks in its walls. Its black-and-white double spiral is one of the most recognisable daymarks on the American coast, designed so that sailors could tell the tower apart from its neighbours in daylight. A climb of 257 steps leads to the lantern, whose beam can be seen about 20 nautical miles out to sea.
Did you know? The first Cape Hatteras lighthouse, funded by Congress in 1794 and finished in 1802, was built of dark sandstone left in its natural colour.
19 Formentor Lighthouse
Faro de Formentor
Spain39.961° N 3.212° E
Image by Leonhard_Niederwimmer from Pixabay The Formentor lighthouse sits at the very end of Mallorca's northernmost peninsula, a long, narrow ridge that runs out into the sea beyond the bay of Pollença. The tower itself is modest, but it stands on the top of cliffs so high that its light burns some 200 metres above the water — the highest lighthouse in the Balearic Islands. Around it the land falls away on three sides, and on clear days the view runs across the channel towards Menorca, over a sea that shifts from turquoise near the coves to deep blue offshore.
Did you know? The light was first lit on 30 April 1863, after building work that had begun in 1857 under the engineer Emili Pou.
20 Portland Head Light
United States43.623° N 70.208° W
Image by rhondaVL from Pixabay Portland Head Light is the lighthouse New England puts on its postcards, and it earns the place. A white conical tower rises from a ledge of dark rock at the entrance to Portland Harbor, with the keepers' house beside it and the Atlantic breaking on the rocks below. From the lawns and paths of the surrounding park, the composition changes with every few steps — tower against open sea, tower above the surf, tower seen across the grounds of the old fort — which is why it has been painted and photographed so often.
Did you know? George Washington told the builders to use stone gathered from the nearby fields and shore, hauled by oxen, because the young government had little money.
21 La Jument Lighthouse
Phare de la Jument
France48.422° N 5.134° W
Falken · CC BY-SA 3.0 La Jument is the lighthouse of the famous storm photograph: a slim stone tower on a reef off Ushant, the island at the westernmost edge of Brittany, with a wall of white water rising around it and a keeper standing in the open doorway. The waters here are among the most feared in Europe, a meeting of Atlantic swell, fast tidal currents and reefs that for centuries turned the approaches to the Channel into a ship graveyard. Around three hundred metres from the shore, the tower rises about 48 metres from its rock, octagonal, with a gallery and lantern at the top.
Did you know? The finished lighthouse cost about 850,000 francs, more than twice the 400,000 francs left for it by Charles-Eugène Potron, a member of the Paris Geographical Society.
22 La Corbière lighthouse
Jersey49.180° N 2.250° W
Image by falco from Pixabay At the southwestern tip of Jersey, where the island ends in a jumble of granite reefs, a white tower stands on a rock that is an island twice a day. La Corbière lighthouse was completed in 1874 to the designs of the engineer Sir John Coode, and it holds a quiet place in engineering history as the first lighthouse in the British Isles to be built of concrete. The tower itself is only about 19 metres tall, but set on its rock the lantern sits some 36 metres above high spring tides, throwing a white light up to 18 nautical miles and a red light up to 16.
Did you know? The name La Corbière means 'the place where crows gather', from the local word for crow, although gulls have long since taken over the rocks.
23 Nazaré Lighthouse
Farol da Nazaré
Portugal · 28.3 km from Leiria39.605° N 9.085° W
Pedro Pacheco Coelho · CC BY-SA 4.0 Nazaré Lighthouse is a small red lantern on the walls of an old fort, and it would be unremarkable if it did not stand where it does. The Fort of São Miguel Arcanjo sits on a rocky promontory about fifty metres above the Atlantic, dividing two very different beaches: to the south the sheltered town beach of Nazaré, to the north Praia do Norte, where the ocean produces some of the largest surfable waves ever recorded. From the headland around the lighthouse, the big-wave surfers of Praia do Norte are watched from almost directly above.
Did you know? When first lit in 1903 the lighthouse burned paraffin and showed a fixed red light; it switched to white in 1926 and was electrified in 1953.
24 Fanad Head Lighthouse
Fanad Head Light
Ireland · 36.1 km from Londonderry/Derry55.276° N 7.632° W
Andreas F. Borchert · CC BY-SA 4.0 Fanad Head Light stands at the tip of the Fanad peninsula in County Donegal, on a low headland where the mouth of Lough Swilly opens onto the Atlantic. The tower is white and compact, 22 metres from foundation to top, but its setting is everything: a cluster of keepers' buildings on green turf, rocks falling into the sea, and the open Atlantic beyond. It has often been voted one of the most beautiful lighthouses in the world, and it is easy to see why from the approach road, where the whole station appears framed by cliffs and ocean.
Did you know? The light flashes five times every 20 seconds, showing white and red sectors, with the white beam reaching about 18 nautical miles.
25 Neist Point Lighthouse
United Kingdom57.423° N 6.788° W
Sanshiro KUBOTA from London, UK · CC BY 2.0 Neist Point is one of the most westerly points of the Isle of Skye, a narrow finger of land that runs out into the Minch, and its lighthouse sits right at the tip. The classic view is not from the lighthouse but towards it: from the clifftop above the car park, the whole point unrolls below — a grassy ridge falling to a sheer wall of dark cliffs, the white tower and its keepers' cottages at the far end, and beyond them open sea with the Outer Hebrides lying low on the horizon across the Minch. At sunset, when the light catches the cliffs and the tower flashes against the fading sky, it is one of the defining images of Skye.
Did you know? The light shows a single white flash every five seconds.
26 Kallur Lighthouse
Faroe Islands · 20.5 km from Klaksvík62.370° N 6.812° W
Holger Weiß · CC BY-SA 3.0 At the northern tip of Kalsoy, one of the most slender islands of the Faroes, a small white lighthouse with a red band stands on a grassy promontory that ends in sheer cliffs. Kallur is the point where the island's long spine runs out into the North Atlantic, and from the headland the view opens across the sound to the mountains of Eysturoy and Streymoy and, to the west, the two sea stacks of Risin and Kellingin. Close by, a narrow ridge drops away on both sides in rock walls about 200 metres high.
Did you know? The name Kalsoy means 'man island', in contrast to its parallel neighbour Kunoy to the east, whose name means 'woman island'.
How this list is ranked
Places are chosen for how they look, not for how famous they are: each one has its own description and a photograph credited to its author. The order is a single world ranking that weighs the beauty of the place in curated photography together with how widely it is documented — the number of language editions of its encyclopedia article and how often that article is read in a year. The list is rebuilt as places are added, so the order and the counts on this page are always current.
Questions people ask
- What is the most beautiful lighthouse in the world?
- On our list, Tower of Hercules (Spain) ranks first, followed by Maiden's Tower (Turkey) and Chania Lighthouse (Greece).
- What is the oldest lighthouse still in use?
- The Tower of Hercules in A Coruña, Spain, built by the Romans in the first or second century AD, is considered the oldest lighthouse still in operation. It became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2009.
- Which country has the most beautiful lighthouses?
- In our collection, the most come from France (5), the United States (5) and the United Kingdom (3).
- Why was the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse moved?
- Erosion had brought the Atlantic close to its base, so in 1999 the whole tower was moved on rails nearly 900 metres inland to a safer position.
- How many lighthouses are on this list in the world?
- The list covers 26 lighthouses in 14 countries. France has the most, with 5.