The Most Beautiful Lighthouses in the United States
5 places · updated 13 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful lighthouses in the United States are Heceta Head Light, Split Rock Lighthouse and Pemaquid Point Light. The list covers 5 lighthouses. Last updated 13 October 2026.
The United States has an unusually varied lighthouse coast. Beyond the rocky Atlantic shores of New England and the barrier islands of the Carolinas, lights were built on the cliffs of the Pacific and along the Great Lakes, inland seas whose storms wrecked ore freighters as surely as any ocean. Many towers were placed on headlands chosen for visibility, which also makes them some of the most dramatic buildings on the coast.
Portland Head Light in Cape Elizabeth, Maine, was first lit in 1791 and is the oldest lighthouse in the state. Pemaquid Point Light stands above bands of tilted, striated rock running into the sea. Cape Hatteras Lighthouse in North Carolina, painted with a black and white spiral, is the tallest brick lighthouse in the country. Split Rock Lighthouse sits on a sheer cliff above Lake Superior, built after a storm in 1905 wrecked several ships nearby. Heceta Head Light, on the Oregon coast, shines from a headland high above the Pacific with its original first-order Fresnel lens.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Heceta Head Light | Lighthouse | |
| 2 | Split Rock Lighthouse | Lighthouse | |
| 3 | Pemaquid Point Light | Lighthouse | |
| 4 | Cape Hatteras Lighthouse | Lighthouse | |
| 5 | Portland Head Light | Lighthouse |
01 Heceta Head Light
United States44.137° N 124.128° W
Image by ArtTower from Pixabay Below the lighthouse, the white Queen Anne-style keeper's house, originally a duplex for the assistant keepers, now operates as a bed-and-breakfast. The setting is what makes Heceta Head memorable: the white tower on its ledge, seen from the beach below with dark forest behind and the ocean breaking on the rocks, is one of the classic views of the Pacific Northwest. The trails through spruce and salal on the headland offer chances to see sea lions, and gray whales during their migrations, and the Sea Lion Caves lie about two miles away.
Did you know? The rock for the tower's base was quarried on the Clackamas River near Oregon City, with masonry shipped from San Francisco.
02 Split Rock Lighthouse
United States47.200° N 91.368° W
Image by MikeGoad from Pixabay The Coast Guard decommissioned the light in 1969, and the station is now run by the Minnesota Historical Society within Split Rock Lighthouse State Park. The complex survives almost complete: tower and lens, fog-signal building, oil house and the three keepers' houses. Every year on 10 November the beacon is lit again in memory of the SS Edmund Fitzgerald, which sank on Lake Superior on that date in 1975 — an evening when the old light shines out over the water it was built to guard.
Did you know? The tower was designed for a larger second-order lens, but construction ran over budget and only a smaller third-order lens could be afforded.
03 Pemaquid Point Light
United States43.837° N 69.506° W
Dennis G. Jarvis · CC BY-SA 2.0 The point marks the tip of the Pemaquid peninsula in the town of Bristol, Lincoln County, at the entrance to Muscongus Bay. The peninsula is a landscape of fishing harbours, coves and spruce woods reaching out into the Gulf of Maine.
Did you know? The original light used an Argand-Lewis parabolic reflector and could be seen for only about two miles.
04 Cape Hatteras Lighthouse
United States35.251° N 75.529° W
Image by 1778011 from Pixabay Hatteras Island is part of the Outer Banks, the thin chain of barrier islands that separates the Atlantic from Pamlico Sound, and most of it lies within the Cape Hatteras National Seashore. The lighthouse stands near the village of Buxton, close to the cape itself.
Did you know? During the Civil War the lens and lantern of the old tower were destroyed, and the light later had to be re-established.
05 Portland Head Light
United States43.623° N 70.208° W
Image by rhondaVL from Pixabay The keepers' house was built in 1891 and now holds a small museum of lenses and lighthouse history, owned, like the grounds, by the town of Cape Elizabeth. The light was automated in August 1989, when the last keeper, Davis Simpson, left the station. The lighthouse stands inside Fort Williams Park, the grounds of a former coastal-defence fort, and the park's paths along the shore make it easy to watch the tower through a whole day's changing light. The tower has been on the National Register of Historic Places since 1973.
Did you know? In 1790 Congress set aside no more than $1,500 to finish the tower, and Alexander Hamilton, as Treasury Secretary, told the builders to carry on.
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 are the most beautiful lighthouses in the United States?
- On our list, Heceta Head Light ranks first, followed by Split Rock Lighthouse and Pemaquid Point Light.
- Why was Cape Hatteras Lighthouse moved?
- Shoreline erosion had brought the ocean within about 120 feet of the tower. In 1999 it was moved some 2,900 feet inland in one piece.
- What is the oldest lighthouse in Maine?
- Portland Head Light in Cape Elizabeth, first lit in January 1791. It was completed under the federal government created by the new Constitution.
- How many lighthouses are on this list in the United States?
- The list covers 5 lighthouses.