ATLAS · LIGHTHOUSES
Every Lighthouse on Earth
The world’s coastal lights on one map: 9,631 lighthouses across 141 countries, each coloured by the era it was built — from the 135 rare survivors raised before 1800, through the great nineteenth-century building surge, to the modern automated towers. So you can read the history of how humanity lit its coastlines at a glance. Data is from Wikidata (CC0), a snapshot taken 2026-06-23.
What the colours mean
Every lighthouse is tinted by when it was built. Red marks the rarest and oldest — the towers raised before 1800, a handful of which trace back to antiquity. Amber is the early lighthouse age of 1800–1849; charge-blue is the great Victorian surge of 1850–1899, when most of the world’s coasts were lit; radar-green is the early-modern 1900–1949; and a soft teal is the modern automated towers of 1950 onward. Not every tower has a recorded build year — those are shown in a dim slate. Clusters take the colour of their oldest member, so a historic stretch of coast still glows red even in a dense bloom. What makes a lighthouse, and why so many were built when they were, is worth two minutes:
How lighthouses work, explained →Lighthouses by country
Where the coastal lights cluster — led by the great archipelago coasts of the Baltic and North Atlantic. Open a country for its oldest tower, the spread of building eras, and how many lighthouses it has on the map.
Every country with a lighthouse
Sweden · United States · Finland · United Kingdom · Canada · France · Japan · Spain · Germany · Italy · Norway · China · Australia · Iceland · Tunisia · Greece · Brazil · Portugal · Ireland · Denmark · Argentina · Russia · Philippines · Mexico · Turkey · Chile · Estonia · Croatia · Madagascar · India · South Africa · New Zealand · Egypt · Cuba · Peru · Morocco · Taiwan · Latvia · Fiji · Poland · Ukraine · Algeria · Cape Verde · Panama · Bahamas · Venezuela · Tanzania · Sri Lanka · Isle of Man · Pakistan · Guernsey · Honduras · Uruguay · Malaysia · Angola · Azerbaijan · Belize · Costa Rica · Djibouti · Eritrea · Haiti · Iran · Cyprus · Israel · Jamaica · Belgium · Bulgaria · Sudan · Trinidad and Tobago · Indonesia · Libya · Malta · Jersey · Lithuania · Mozambique · Romania · Albania · Faroe Islands · Guatemala · Kuwait · Lebanon · Maldives · South Korea · El Salvador · Thailand · Barbados · Namibia · Oman · Singapore · Switzerland · Vietnam · Bangladesh · British Virgin Islands · Cameroon · Nicaragua · North Korea · Saint Helena, Ascension and Tristan da Cunha · Tonga · Aruba · Austria · Benin · Cayman Islands · Dominican Republic · Ghana · Guinea-Bissau · MC · Senegal · Seychelles · Somalia · AN · Anguilla · Curaçao · Equatorial Guinea · Georgia · Liberia · São Tomé and Principe · Turks and Caicos Islands · Western Sahara (disputed territory) · Yemen · Antigua and Barbuda · Bermuda · Bolivia · Brunei · Colombia · Côte d'Ivoire · Dominica · Guinea · Guyana · Hong Kong · Iraq · Mauritania · Micronesia · Palestine · Papua New Guinea · Qatar · Saint Lucia · Saudi Arabia · Serbia · Sierra Leone · Timor-Leste · Togo
About this data
Lighthouses, locations and build years come from Wikidata, the open, CC0 knowledge base. We map every tower Wikidata classes as a lighthouse that has real coordinates; about two-thirds carry a recorded year of construction (the colour axis), and those without one are shown honestly as “era unknown” rather than guessed. Tower heights, where recorded, appear in each marker’s popup, with obviously erroneous figures dropped. Lighthouses without a country — those on mid-ocean rocks and international waters — still appear on the map but have no country page. This is a map of where the world’s lighthouses are and when they were built, not a ranking or a navigational chart. As community-maintained data it’s broad but imperfect; we refresh the snapshot periodically rather than calling Wikidata on every visit.