Sanibel Island Lighthouse in Lee County, Florida

Photograph: Sanibel Island Lighthouse.jpg by 21djones · CC BY-SA 4.0 · Restored from the credited Wikimedia Commons file, normalized to the consistent attraction-card frame and converted to WebP by 1stFlorida.com. Portrait originals retain their complete composition over a softly blurred extension of the same photograph.

Lee County attraction

Sanibel Island Lighthouse

Lee County · Gulf Coast

An iron skeleton tower first lit on August 20, 1884, at the eastern point of Sanibel Island.

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ABOUT THIS PLACE

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. The design is a braced iron frame rather than a masonry tower, which is why it has survived storms that would have taken a brick one down. Two keepers' dwellings stood on stilts beside it. The light was automated in 1949 and the tract went on the National Register of Historic Places in 1974. Hurricane Ian came ashore here on September 28, 2022, and destroyed both keepers' houses and every outbuilding on the site; the tower lost one of its four legs and stayed standing. It was repaired and relit on February 28, 2023. The City of Sanibel owns the ground and the Coast Guard still runs the light. The grounds, the fishing pier and the beach around the base are open to the public, but the tower itself cannot be climbed

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