Ask 1stFlorida
Florida has more standing lighthouses than any other state and about a dozen let you climb them.
Ponce de Leon Inlet in Volusia County is the tallest in Florida at 175 feet and has its keepers' houses intact as a museum. St Augustine Lighthouse in St Johns County is the black and white spiral with 219 steps. Jupiter Inlet in Palm Beach County is the red brick one, standing since 1860. Key West Lighthouse sits inland from the water because the island grew around it. Others you can visit: Sanibel Island in Lee County, Cape Canaveral in Brevard, Pensacola in Escambia, Amelia Island in Nassau, St Marks in Wakulla, and Crooked River and Cape St George in Franklin County.
Volusia County. It was built of brick and first lit in 1887. Construction was supervised by Chief Engineer Orville E. Babcock until he drowned in the inlet in 1884, three years before the light went into service.
Open the guide →St. Johns County. The tower went up in 1874 and the keepers' house followed in 1876, and both stand at 100 Red Cox Drive on Anastasia Island. Climbing it means 219 steps up a spiral staircase to a gallery with a view over the whole of St. Augustine, the inlet and the Atlantic.
Open the guide →Palm Beach County. The Jupiter Inlet Lighthouse has been working since 1860, and the historical society's keeper records run from that year through to 1987. It is climbed by a flight of 105 steps, and children have to be at least 48 inches tall to make the climb, which is the thing to check before driving over with a small family.
Open the guide →Monroe County. The first light on this island was destroyed by the hurricane of 1846 and this tower replaced it two years later. What made it unusual was its keeper: a woman held the post in the nineteenth century, which was close to unheard of in the service.
Open the guide →Lee County. It stands ninety-eight feet high, with the light about a hundred and two feet above the sea, and it was built to guide shipping into San Carlos Bay and the port of Punta Rassa, then the busiest cattle shipping point on this coast.
Open the guide →Brevard County. The Cape Canaveral Lighthouse has stood on the Cape for more than 155 years and is owned today by the United States Space Force, with the Coast Guard maintaining it as an active aid to navigation.
Open the guide →Escambia County. Pensacola got its first light in 1823, a lightship called the Aurora Borealis, then a 40-foot tower in 1825. Neither worked well: the lightship had to anchor inside the bay because of rough water, and trees blocked the tower's light.
Open the guide →Nassau County. The stone and brick came from the 1820 lighthouse on Cumberland Island, just across the water in Georgia, taken down and carried over. It is a brick tower finished in stucco, fifty feet when it was built and raised to sixty-four in 1881, putting the light a hundred and seven feet above the sea.
Open the guide →Wakulla County. Congress paid for the first tower in 1828 and Winslow Lewis finished it in March 1830. The work was disputed, so Calvin Knowlton rebuilt it in 1831. Erosion forced the whole thing to be moved and rebuilt again in 1842, which is the tower standing today.
Open the guide →Franklin County. The Crooked River Lighthouse was built in 1895 to replace the Dog Island light, which a hurricane had destroyed in 1875. It guided timber ships and local fishing boats through the pass between Dog Island and St. George Island.
Open the guide →Franklin County. The first light here went up in 1833 near the west end of St. George Island, 65 feet tall, marking the way into Apalachicola Bay while the town was a cotton port.
Open the guide →Sanibel Island in Lee County is the reason people fly in with a bucket.
Manatees cannot survive long in water below about sixty-eight degrees, so from November to March they crowd into the springs and the warm-water outflows, and that is when you see them in numbers.
Florida beaches carry most of the loggerhead nesting in the western hemisphere and the season runs from March to October, with hatchlings from late June.
Have a different question? Ask 1stFlorida →