The Lighthouses of South Africa

Every Lighthouse Mill is shaped on a real lighthouse. Here are the stories of all 52, coast by coast, from the fog of the West Coast to the warm harbours of KwaZulu-Natal, and the six old lights that no longer shine. Prefer to explore? Open the map.

The Atlantic Coast (15)
Port Nolloth · Hondeklipbaai · Groenriviermond · Doringbaai · Dassen Island · Stompneuspunt · Cape St Martin · Cape Columbine · North Head · South Head · Robben Island · Green Point (Cape Town) · Milnerton · Slangkoppunt · Cape Point
The Agulhas Coast (10)
Roman Rock · Cape Hangklip · Danger Point · Quoin Point · Cape Agulhas · Cape Infanta · Ystervarkpunt · Cape St Blaize · Cape Seal · Seal Point
The Wild Coast and Eastern Cape (9)
Deal · Cape Recife · Bird Island · Great Fish Point · Hood Point · Cape Morgan · Mbashe · Cape Hermes · South Sand Bluff
The KwaZulu-Natal Coast (12)
North Sand Bluff · Port Shepstone · Ifafa Beach · Green Point (KwaZulu-Natal) · Cooper · Umhlanga Rocks · Tugela · Durnford · Richards Bay · Cape St Lucia · Cape Vidal · Jesser Point
The Elders: lights of the past (6)
Mouille Point · Old Cape Point · Hill · Bluff · Castle Point · Old Bird Island

15 lighthouses

The Atlantic Coast

Cold, fog bound shores from Port Nolloth to Cape Point.

Port Nolloth

A Strange Little Tower at the Edge of Diamond Country

Port Nolloth, Namaqualand, Northern Cape

Port Nolloth's lighthouse looks nothing like a classic tower: an 11 m aluminium lattice frame carrying a black and white triangle, set among houses on a private looking beachfront. It guards the old copper port of Namaqualand, where a recorded 1 200 hours of fog a year once hid the coast.

Port Nolloth is the most westerly port on the South African coast with a lighthouse. It was named after Commander M S Nolloth of HMS Frolic, sent in 1854 to find bays where copper from the booming Springbok and O'Kiep mines could be loaded. Ore came some 150 km by ox wagon, and a narrow gauge railway to O'Kiep was completed by 1876, with mules hauling the rail cars at first. Copper mining stopped soon after the First World War and restarted in 1937, diamonds turned up at Alexander Bay and Oranjemund, and crayfish, the red gold of this coast, now keep the boats busy.

Fog was the constant problem. A thick bank that locals call the Malmokkie rolls in from the cold sea, and the engineer H C Cooper recorded some 1 200 hours of it a year. The Carl von Schlick Beacon of about 1870 proved ineffective in it. In 1886 the writer W C Scully is reported to have remarked that the light at Port Nolloth was useful mainly as a sign marking the town, since the rocks around it were just as dangerous. In April 1909 a fog signal began firing one explosion every 20 minutes between sunrise and sunset from an outcrop 1.5 km south of the present lighthouse, and that year an 18.5 m cast iron lighthouse went up on the beacon's site, held upright by four heavy steel wire guys, with a fifth order lens floating on a bath of mercury and turned by clockwork.

An electronic fog signal replaced the explosions in 1943. The freighters Border in 1947 and Bechuana in 1950 are reported to have run aground south of the port while riding out storms, and the signal was silenced, to the delight of residents, in March 1975, once coasters were forbidden to come within five miles of the shore in fog.

On 4 April 1979 an 11 m aluminium lattice tower took over. Instead of a lantern room it carries a triangular black and white daymark. The light shows four flashes every 24 seconds from 17 m above the sea and reaches 19 nm, and with a bar light in front and an unlit marker behind, it also serves as a leading line into the harbour. The lighthouse is still lived in, and among the beachfront homes it has the look of a private lighthouse in a seaside garden. A short range fog signal in front of it is switched on by hand when fog is sighted.

Keepers never loved the posting. Cape Town was a 700 km journey away, with a treacherous stretch between Citrusdal and Klawer, medical care was some 200 km off, and older children had to go to boarding school. It was little consolation that in spring the desolate countryside turns into a blanket of wildflowers.

Station established: 1909
Present tower first lit: 1979
Tower height: 11 m
Light above sea: 17 m
Light: Composite group flashing, four flashes every 24 seconds
Range: 19 nautical miles
Position: 29° 14.9' S, 16° 52.1' E

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Hondeklipbaai

The Bay Named for a Dog Shaped Rock

Hondeklip Bay, Namaqualand, Northern Cape

At remote Hondeklip Bay, a lighthouse has marked the Namaqualand coast since 1956. A black steel lattice tower with a red and white diamond daymark once stood here, before a concrete tower began to replace it, above a village that began as a copper ore port.

Hondeklip Bay takes its name from a rock shaped like a dog. In 1846 a ship's captain named Thomas Grace is said to have spotted the dog shaped stone above a small natural harbour, and the place has been Hondeklip, the dog stone, ever since. Copper was found inland, and the first cargo of ore sailed for Wales in August 1852, hauled to the bay by wagon from the O'Kiep mines. Hondeklip Bay became a magisterial district in 1862. Trade later drifted to Port Nolloth, which had a railway to the mines, but the bay kept going, first with a fish processing factory from 1925 and later with crayfish boats. The Dog Stone itself is said to have lost its nose and ear to the weather.

Navigational lights served the fishing boats and copper ships long before the first lighthouse. That one was commissioned on 15 February 1956: an 8 m steel lattice tower painted black, with a red and white diamond daymark and an acetylene gas lantern with an open flame flasher. The office of the Chief Civil Engineer designed it, the railway workshop at Elandsfontein built it, and it cost R8 270. In the late 1970s the factory staff are reported to have looked after the fog signal, using it to help their own boats.

When the old frame wore out, a solid concrete cylinder designed by the Structural Design Office of Transnet was begun to replace it, with the changeover dated to 2009 and a height of 11.8 m listed. One contractor started the work and another took it over, and a temporary light marked the bay in the meantime. The light is listed at 34 m above the sea, a rotating beacon on a 36 watt lamp that runs on solar power, flashes three times every 15 seconds and reaches 15 nm. Nobody lives here and the lighthouse is not open to the public. On 1 August 2003 a vessel called the Jahleel came to grief on this shore, and her rusting hull came to rest in the surf close to the brightly painted houses of the village.

Station established: 1956
Present tower first lit: 2009
Tower height: 11.8 m
Light above sea: 34 m
Light: Three white flashes every 15 seconds
Range: 15 nautical miles
Position: 30° 18.5' S, 17° 16.3' E

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Groenriviermond

A Yellow Beacon at the River Mouth

Groenriviermond, Namaqualand, Northern Cape

Lit on 21 November 1988, Groenriviermond is a bright yellow concrete tower with a single black band on a lonely Namaqualand shore. Its lantern and lens first served at Cape Agulhas. The light flashes once every 5 seconds, reaches 26 nm and warns ships off two rocky shoals near the Groen River mouth.

The Groen River winds across flat Namaqualand plains lined with karee trees before it slips into the Atlantic, forming a small lagoon that opens at high tide. Groenriviermond means Green River Mouth, after the green plant life along the river, and about 3 km down the coast a bright yellow tower rises out of the sand and scrub, between Doringbaai and Hondeklipbaai.

This lighthouse is young by South African standards, first lit on 21 November 1988. Transnet's Chief Civil Engineer's office designed it, harbour engineer's staff from Cape Town put it up, and it cost R606 500. The tower is 17.2 m tall, painted yellow with a single black band under a yellow lantern house. Until it came into service, the yellow tower at Cape Vidal was the only yellow lighthouse in South Africa, and the colour stands out against the green vegetation. Its job is to warn ships of two rocky shoals lying roughly 0.5 km and 1 km off the beach.

The lantern house and lens have a history of their own. They served at Cape Agulhas from 1968 until 1988, when the old tower there was restored, and then moved to this new tower. The lens is a fourth order, four panel Stone Chance optic. It first burned a 1 500 watt incandescent lamp and now uses a 400 watt metal halide lamp rated at 1 069 000 candelas, giving one flash every 5 seconds that reaches 26 nm.

The station is far from the electricity grid. Three diesel generator sets once supplied the light and the quarters for visiting staff, and a radio link lets the monitoring centre at Cape Point watch and control the light. A 2023 report says solar panels now charge batteries by day and power the light at night, with one generator kept as standby. Inside, the tower even has air conditioning, which one lighthouse writer found in no other tower, and rags called lappies are tied to the locks, flapping in the wind to keep sand and salty air out of the keyholes.

Getting here is hard. Part of the coast is closed because of diamond concessions, so the way in runs through Garies, about 60 km inland, over gravel roads in poor condition, and the constant wind builds sand drifts that can trap a four wheel drive vehicle. Yellow wildflowers grow around the tower and echo its colour. A 2007 geocachers' account describes mobile phone reception disappearing about 20 km out of Garies and a sand track running about 70 km down the coast from the lighthouse, though conditions may have changed since.

First lit: 1988
Tower height: 17.2 m
Light above sea: 27.3 m
Light: One white flash every 5 seconds
Range: 26 nautical miles
Position: 30° 51.9' S, 17° 34.8' E

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Doringbaai

Rebuilt after the storm that flattened it

Doringbaai, near Lutzville, Matzikama, West Coast of the Western Cape

Doringbaai means Thorn Bay, a West Coast fishing village famed for rock lobster. Its first lighthouse, an aluminium lattice tower lit on 2 April 1963, was flattened by a violent storm on 15 June 1991. The white concrete tower with its black band took over on 1 September 1993.

Doringbaai, which means Thorn Bay, is a small fishing village on the West Coast, between Lambert's Bay to the south and Strandfontein to the north, a short distance from the mouth of the Oliphants River. It is known for its Cape rock lobster and for its lighthouse, which stands sentinel on a rocky promontory. That rock forms a natural breakwater, a safe haven for boats once they have come through the rocks and surf into the bay, where black mussels abound. The name Thorn Bay is said to come from the thorn bushes along the shore, and a local history account says supplies landed in the bay were once carried by camel to Vanrhynsdorp (not independently confirmed).

The first light was a 21 m aluminium lattice tower, commissioned on 2 April 1963 at a cost of R40 023. Like every lighthouse built after Cape Columbine, it ran without a keeper. It carried a fourth order, two panel Stone Chance lens with a 1 500 watt lamp. On 15 June 1991 a violent storm demolished the tower and its lens.

The replacement was designed in the Chief Civil Engineer's office of Transnet and built by Cape Town harbour staff, and it was commissioned on 1 September 1993. Tower and equipment cost R900 000. It is a cylindrical concrete tower, 24 m tall, painted white, with a bold black band at the top and a white lantern house. In place of a glass lens it carries a Pharos Marine revolving sealed beam lamp array, which gives two flashes every 10 seconds from 36 m above the sea, with 1 200 000 candelas and a range of 25 nm. After this collapse the lattice tower at South Sand Bluff on the Wild Coast was also replaced by concrete, as part of a strategy of building more solid towers.

Nobody lives here now. The light is watched by telemetry from Cape Point, the station has mains power with a standby diesel generator set, and the base of the tower holds a meticulously maintained engine room. Lighthouse Services staff keep it in order: Barnie Germishuys, operational supervisor for the lighthouses, ports and harbours of the South Western Region, is pictured on its stairs, and a door of railway sleeper wood carries a handle and lock set specially made by Ben Bernhardt and Hennie Conradie. In the village the old crayfish factory has become a winery.

Station established: 1963
Present tower first lit: 1993
Tower height: 24 m
Light above sea: 36 m
Light: Group flashing, two flashes every 10 seconds
Range: 25 nautical miles
Position: 31° 49.0' S, 18° 14.0' E

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Dassen Island

A lonely beacon on the penguin island

Dassen Island, about 9 km off Yzerfontein, West Coast of the Western Cape

About 9 km off Yzerfontein, Dassen Island is a windy home of African penguins where fog, rocks and heavy swell have claimed ships since at least 1734. Its red and white cast iron lighthouse, commissioned on 15 April 1893, still flashes twice every 30 seconds.

Dassen Island lies about 9 km off Yzerfontein and is named for the rock hyraxes, or dassies, that early visitors found there in vast numbers. Seals were just as plentiful, but the name Robben Island had already gone to the island nearer Cape Town. Folklore says rabbits and tortoises were put ashore so that shipwreck survivors would have food.

Guano was harvested here from the 1840s and prized as fertiliser, and penguin eggs were gathered for the table until 1967. The harvest peaked in 1919, when some 600 000 eggs were taken. More than a million African penguins at the start of the twentieth century had dwindled to about 25 000 by the early 1990s, and the island became a nature reserve in 1987.

A lighthouse commission urged a powerful light here in 1890. Chance Brothers of Birmingham supplied the 28 m cast iron tower, commissioned on 15 April 1893 for 14 836 pounds and 2 pence, on a round base of island stone hauled in by ox wagon from a quarry that is now a water catchment. Red and white bands run up the tower beneath a red lantern house with a white dome. The first lens was a four panel first order optic whose rotating part weighed about three tons and, unlike most large lenses, was carried on eight steel rollers instead of floating on mercury, turned by hand wound clockwork. At first it gave only 47 000 candelas, visible for 18 nm. Since 1974 a smaller two panel optic has given two flashes every 30 seconds at 1 400 000 candelas, visible for 26 nm from 47 m above the sea, and on a clear day from Signal Hill in Cape Town.

The British wooden ship Childe Harold, bound from Bombay to London with spices, ivory and coffee, struck the south east point at night in 1850, and her captain drowned trying to carry a line ashore. The Wallarah ran aground in heavy fog on her maiden voyage in 1891, close to where the Ashleigh Brook was lost the year before. Reports say that on 19 October 1876 the Castle Line mailship Windsor Castle ran onto a reef; Captain John Hewat sent the lifeboats away, everyone reached a small beach, and even the mail bags were saved dry. The fishing vessel Southern Author, aground since 1961, still faces the lighthouse.

Supplies and news once came by coaster and tug, and pigeon post carried messages to Green Point lighthouse before Morse code and the telephone. One account says a tug brought stores and the keepers' children home for school holidays until about 1969, when helicopters took over. The light is not manned at present, though it may be again one day.

First lit: 1893
Tower height: 28 m
Light above sea: 47 m
Light: Group flashing, two flashes every 30 seconds
Range: 26 nautical miles
Position: 33° 25.8' S, 18° 05.5' E

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Stompneuspunt

A small white light at the mouth of St Helena Bay

Stompneusbaai, at the southern point of St Helena Bay, West Coast of the Western Cape

Stompneuspunt marks the southern point of St Helena Bay. Its small white tower is topped by a polygonal minaret and a green dome, and it is described as unlike any other lighthouse in South Africa. A black and white wooden beacon was commissioned here on 1 December 1934; the present tower dates from February 2001.

Stompneus Point marks the southern point of St Helena Bay, near Vredenburg on the West Coast. It is named for the stumpnose, a local fish, and the tranquil seaside resort beside it is described as one of the region's best kept secrets. Stompneuspunt is one of the smaller lights on this coast.

The first beacon here was a pyramid shaped wooden structure painted black with a white central band, commissioned on 1 December 1934 and lit by a 300 mm acetylene gas lantern with an open flame flasher. The tower seen today was commissioned in February 2001. Heinrich Gerstner Harding Architects designed it with the engineering firm of Wouter Engelbrecht, and Zamudio Construction built it. It is a square brick tower, 8 m tall and painted white, with an exotic Middle Eastern air that makes it unlike any other lighthouse in South Africa. Three quarters of the way up runs a cornice with two tapered bands of fluting, and above it rises a tall polygonal minaret with arched windows, a white lantern house and a green dome.

A Tideland ML300 lantern with a 35 watt quartz halogen lamp, powered by a solar photovoltaic system, flashes once every 3 seconds from 12 m above the sea. It gives 1 403 candelas and a range of 10 nm. Nobody lives here and the tower is not open to visitors, but it stands on rocks at the edge of a sandy beach, in view of the village.

Some lists class Stompneuspunt as a beacon rather than a full lighthouse. We include it because it is a tower with a lantern and a light of its own, and a West Coast collection felt incomplete without it.

Station established: 1934
Present tower first lit: 2001
Tower height: 8 m
Light above sea: 12 m
Light: One white flash every 3 seconds
Position: 32° 42.2' S, 17° 58.9' E

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Cape St Martin

A small light on a dangerous reef coast

Cape St Martin, southern St Helena Bay, near Stompneusbaai and Paternoster, West Coast of the Western Cape

On 22 October 1826 the British ship Britannia struck a reef on this coast and gave Britannia Bay its name. Cape St Martin's modest lattice tower, lit on 12 December 1977, now watches over Britannia Reef with a red sector in its light, flashing every 10 seconds and reaching 21 nm.

Cape St Martin stands on the western side of Britannia Bay, on South Africa's West Coast, with St Helena Bay and Vredenburg the nearest towns. The bay takes its name from the British ship Britannia, which struck a reef here on 22 October 1826. That reef is now known as Britannia Blinder. The ship did not go down. She was beached safely near the cape, on a beautiful stretch of shore called the Golden Mile, and the wreck was bought by a local farmer, Martin Melck, who salvaged a considerable part of her cargo.

Britannia Reef is regarded as the most dangerous of the submerged reefs along this shore, which is notorious for foul weather, and the red sector of the light is aimed at it. The tower is a 10 m aluminium lattice frame carrying a triangular daymark in the middle of the frame, put up by the Cape Town firm StructAL and commissioned on 12 December 1977. Its first lantern burned acetylene gas with an open flame. Today a six panel rotating beacon with a 100 watt lamp gives one white and red flash every 10 seconds from 18 m above the sea, at 214 900 candelas, and reaches 21 nm. The red sector covers 35 degrees, so a crew that sees red is inside the reef's danger zone.

Nobody lives here and the station is not open to the public. The lamp runs on mains power with battery backup, and the light is watched by telemetry from Cape Point. Across the bay from the tower, white houses line the shore. This is a different light from Cape Columbine, a much more powerful one that stands to the south near Paternoster.

First lit: 1977
Tower height: 10 m
Light above sea: 18 m
Light: One white and red flash every 10 seconds, with a red sector of 35 degrees over Britannia Reef
Range: 21 nautical miles
Position: 32° 42.9' S, 17° 55.3' E

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Cape Columbine

The last lighthouse built with keepers in mind

Cape Columbine Nature Reserve, near Paternoster, West Coast of the Western Cape

Cape Columbine stands on a granite headland above the reefs of the Paternoster coast, named after a barque lost in 1829. Lit on 1 October 1936, it was the last manned lighthouse built in South Africa, and its keepers' cottages now take guests.

Cape Columbine stands on Castle Rock, a prominent granite headland in the 263 hectare Columbine Nature Reserve, about 5 km from the fishing village of Paternoster. A Cape Times writer in 1936 called Paternoster the part of the South African coast most dreaded by mariners, with hidden dangers, heavy gales, a confused sea and fog, and Britannia Reef to the north is thought to be the most dangerous of its reefs. In spring the sandveld around the lighthouse fills with fynbos and wildflowers.

The cape is named after the barque Columbine, wrecked in the area in 1829, reportedly on 31 March and about 1.5 km north of the present lighthouse. She was far from the last. The troopship Saint Lawrence is reported to have been lost off Great Paternoster Point in 1876, carrying troops, though no lives were lost. The mail steamer Lisboa went down on Soldiers Reef in a gale on 23 October 1910, and folklore says her cargo of red wine stained the sea and that locals buried washed up barrels until customs officials gave up searching. The Haleric sank off Great Paternoster Point in 1932, only four years before the light came.

Despite the obvious need, the lighthouse came only in 1936, though a commission is reported to have found the site suitable in 1906. H C Cooper, South Africa's first lighthouse engineer, designed and built the art deco tower, a square white masonry monolith with a red lantern house, for 21 793 pounds. At its commissioning on 1 October 1936 a light, a fog signal and a radio beacon worked together for the first time in South Africa, and it remains the last manned lighthouse built in the country. The tower is 15 m tall, but the light sits 80 m above the sea.

The third order lens, two Chance Brothers panels, was first lit by a 4 000 watt bulb and turned by clockwork that keepers wound about three times a night, even for some time after electricity arrived. Today a 400 watt metal halide lamp gives one flash every 15 seconds at 5 040 000 candelas, reaching 30 nm. An air operated fog signal sounded from twin emitters on the tower until 1995, when an electric one on its own green steel frame was sited closer to the sea. Cape rock kestrels occupy the ledge of one old emitter, and rock pigeons once nested right below one, undeterred when it suddenly blasted its warning.

Keeper families lived on the point. Denis Addison, son of Bea and Tom Addison, says he was born at Cape Columbine, and Wayne Brown and Japie Greeff are named among its keepers. The station is still manned, protected as a heritage building and open to visitors, and three of the keepers' cottages offer four star self catering stays. A recent keeper said he once sensed a presence in the tower and told it to go away because he had work to do (a keeper's own tale, not documented history).

First lit: 1936
Tower height: 15 m
Light above sea: 80 m
Light: One flash every 15 seconds
Range: 30 nautical miles
Position: 32° 49.6' S, 17° 51.5' E

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North Head

Guarding the Northern Gate of Saldanha Bay

Saldanha Bay, West Coast, Western Cape

North Head guards the northern side of the entrance to Saldanha Bay. It began on 12 July 1939 as a small gas lantern on a white concrete pillar. Today a white tower with a spiral black band, commissioned in August 2005, stands beside the aluminium lattice tower it replaced.

Saldanha Bay takes its name from the Portuguese. Sixteenth century mariners first used the name Aguada de Saldanha, the watering place of Saldanha, for what later became Table Bay, after the admiral Antonio de Saldanha, who never visited the bay that now carries his name. The Dutch East India Company found it an excellent place for ship repairs and used it for 143 years. In 1863 Raphael Semmes, commander of the Confederate raider CSS Alabama, wrote that there was no finer sheet of landlocked water in the world, while Cape Town's anchorage lay open to the winter gales.

The bay has a long record of wrecks. The Dutch East Indiaman Meresteijn, bound from Amsterdam to Batavia with troops and silver coins, foundered off Jutten Island in a storm on 3 April 1702. The silver lay on the seabed for some 250 years, until Trevor Hayward and Barry Williams found the wreck in March 1971 and broke open a hard concretion in a rocky gully, full of coins. Before North Head was built, many ships came to grief close to it: the Pescadora was wrecked near the entrance on 4 January 1839, and the SS Robilant struck Jacobs Reef in dense fog on 5 February 1890.

The first light at North Head was commissioned on 12 July 1939: a 300 mm acetylene gas lantern with an open flame flasher, set on a square concrete pillar painted white with a black stripe on each side. Iron ore from the Northern Cape is exported through the bay in gigantic ships, and in 1969 two almost identical lighthouses were erected, one on each side of the entrance. North Head's came into service on 2 December 1969 as a 23 m aluminium lattice tower with a square daymark and a red lantern house.

In August 2005 a round concrete tower, 21 m tall, took over, and the lens and lantern house were moved across from the lattice. Painted white with a spiral black band and a white lantern house, it shows three flashes every 20 seconds from 33 m above the sea, with 511 000 candelas and a range of 23 nm, through a fourth order, three panel Stone Chance lens. South Head flashes four times every 30 seconds, and the two are twins apart from their lenses and paint. From the water the new tower seems to rise out of jagged rocks, with the old lattice close behind it. Nobody lives here: the light is watched by telemetry from Cape Point. The invisible line between North Head and South Head is said to be the official arrival line for the bay.

Station established: 1939
Present tower first lit: 2005
Tower height: 21 m
Light above sea: 33 m
Light: Three white flashes every 20 seconds
Range: 23 nautical miles
Position: 33° 03.0' S, 17° 54.7' E

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South Head

South Head, the Twin Across Saldanha Bay

Donkergat, Saldanha Bay, West Coast, Western Cape

South Head began on 2 December 1969 as the near identical twin of North Head, an aluminium lattice tower across the mouth of Saldanha Bay. Its concrete tower of 7 December 2000, white below and yellow above, now stands on the Donkergat headland, where Norwegian whalers came ashore in 1909.

The two lights that guard the mouth of Saldanha Bay face each other across the water. South Head is the southern partner, on the Donkergat headland. The road to it passes through the West Coast National Park and a South African National Defence Force base, and the lighthouse is closed to visitors. In 1803 Lichtenstein called Saldanha Bay the most secure and convenient harbour on the whole coast of southern Africa.

Iron ore from the Northern Cape is shipped through the bay in gigantic ships, and to handle the increasing tonnage two almost identical lighthouses were erected in 1969, one on each side of the entrance. South Head's was lit on 2 December 1969 as a 23 m aluminium lattice tower with a square daymark and a red lantern house, at an original cost of R68 237. On 7 December 2000 a round concrete tower, also 23 m tall, designed in Transnet's structural design office and built by Masonwabe, took over. Where North Head wears a black spiral, South Head is painted white below and yellow above, with a yellow lantern house, so the twins can now be told apart. Its fourth order, four panel Stone Chance lens gives four flashes every 30 seconds, where North Head gives three every 20. The light shines from 34 m above the sea with 572 000 candelas and a range of 24 nm, and the optic drive has two motors, one on duty and one on standby.

Few ships have come to grief right here, but the Cottager was wrecked just south of the bay entrance on 8 April 1865, and the SS Hamlet was wrecked on South Head in April 1927 while carrying coal, timber and provisions from Table Bay to the Irvin and Johnson whaling station.

Donkergat has a harder past. A Norwegian whaling expedition came ashore here in 1909, and by 1910 a land station was fully operational. By the time whaling was banned in 1967 an estimated 40 000 whales had been caught and processed there. Local accounts add that the station was revived in 1947, and that sharks drawn by the towed carcasses once made a nearby beach dangerous. With the ban, whale biltong, whale steak and West Coast frikkadelle, a mixture of whale meat and pork, disappeared from local tables. Whales now return each year as seasonal visitors, and whale watchers come for them between May and October. The invisible line between South Head and North Head is said to be the official arrival line for Saldanha Bay.

Station established: 1969
Present tower first lit: 2000
Tower height: 23 m
Light above sea: 34 m
Light: Four white flashes every 30 seconds
Range: 24 nautical miles
Position: 33° 06.3' S, 17° 57.3' E

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Robben Island

Lit from Minto Hill since 1865

Robben Island, Table Bay, off Cape Town

On the highest point of Robben Island, a white tower with one black stripe has guided ships into Table Bay since 1 January 1865. Dutch signal fires were lit on the same hill in the 1650s, and the island later became the place where Nelson Mandela was imprisoned.

Robben Island lies low in Table Bay off Cape Town, a little over 3 km across, and is named for the seals, robben in Dutch, that once crowded its shores. The Dutch called its highest point Vuurberg, Fire Mountain, and it is now Minto Hill. Signal fires lit here on the orders of Jan van Riebeeck in the 1650s made it the site of the first lighted aid to navigation in South Africa. A diary entry of 1658 explains how it worked: the island's brushwood hardly burned, so pitch rings were to be brought from the mainland and kept alight whenever a Dutch East India Company ship was sighted at nightfall, and put out if the ship proved foreign.

The Cape Town Commercial Exchange asked for a lighthouse on the island in 1852 and 1853, and in 1855 the Cape government passed the law that allowed one to be built and light dues to be collected, the start of the dues that still fund South Africa's lighthouses. John Scott Tucker's tower was commissioned on 1 January 1865 for 7 127 pounds 8 shillings 2 pence.

It is a round tower of rubble masonry, 18 m tall, painted white with a red lantern house and one black vertical stripe that marks the start of a measured nautical mile. The lantern room keeps its original mahogany panelling. The first order drum lens dates from 1865, and its light was fixed until 1907, when revolving screens on an aluminium float in a mercury bath, turned by hand wound spring clockwork, made it occulting. No other South African lighthouse used such a system. Today it shows for 5 seconds out of every 7 at 464 000 candelas and carries 24 nm, one of only two flashing lights in the country and the only one whose flash outlasts its eclipse. A red filter added on 1 July 1940 warns ships off Whale Rock.

Fog signals followed: an explosive type on 1 August 1902, about 1.5 km from the tower, and a twin diaphone in October 1925. After that the man on duty could sleep from 7 pm to 7 am until a telephone call from the lighthouse told him fog had come down, and he was then paid two shillings and sixpence an hour to sound the horn.

More than 200 wrecks lie in Table Bay and around the island, the largest concentration on the coast. The island has also served as a prison since the Dutch days, a leper colony, a refuge for Cape Town's chronically sick and paupers, and a defence station in World War II. Between 1961 and 1991 more than 3 000 political prisoners were held here, Nelson Mandela among them, on the island from 1964 to 1982. It became a World Heritage Site in 1999.

Station established: 1650s
Present tower first lit: 1865
Tower height: 18 m
Light above sea: 47 m
Light: Occulting: light shown for 5 seconds every 7 seconds, with a red sector over Whale Rock
Range: 24 nautical miles
Position: 33° 48.9' S, 18° 22.5' E

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Green Point (Cape Town)

South Africa's Oldest Light Still Shines on Table Bay

Mouille Point, Green Point, Cape Town, Western Cape

First lit on 12 April 1824, Green Point is the oldest working lighthouse in South Africa. An acting governor began it apparently without London's approval, its red and white tower lit a helicopter rescue in 1966, and since 1993 it has housed the head office of the country's lighthouse service.

Before Green Point there were only signal fires, first ordered on Robben Island in the days of Jan van Riebeeck. The first solidly built lighthouse in the country was the work of Herman Schutte, born in Bremen in 1761, who came to the Cape in 1789, and by 1820 was an inspector of government buildings.

The project began without proper authority. Sir Rufane Donkin, acting governor in 1820 and 1821, set it going somewhat on his own, and building appears to have started in September 1821 without approval from London. Storms in 1822 damaged the unfinished walls, and Lord Charles Somerset came back to bills for repairs and no plans, as Donkin had taken them. The Admiralty asked Captain Brenton, a former superintendent at Simon's Town, who thought the light would do little for the Royal Navy but a great deal for the merchant ships lost in Table Bay. Permission followed, and Schutte finished by 1823.

The light first shone on the evening of Monday 12 April 1824, at a cost of 6 420 pounds 16 shillings 5 pence. Lepaute of Paris supplied the lanterns and John Fell of Cape Town the lamps: two separate fixed white lights, each a single wick Argand lamp burning sperm oil behind polished parabolic reflectors. The tower is 16 m tall, extended slightly in 1864 for a new lantern house, with rubble walls nearly 2 m thick and its original wooden door still in place. The optic became a fourth order lens in 1842, a revolving third order lens in 1865, and in 1922 the present three panel third order lens, which turns on a bath of mercury.

Today a 400 watt metal halide lamp gives one flash every 10 seconds, about 850 000 candelas, seen out to 25 nm. The foghorn has had two voices: a deep grunting diaphone on top of the tower from January 1926, and since 1986 a higher pitched nautophone from an emitter set nearer the sea. Foghorns everywhere collect nicknames such as Moaning Minnie.

The colours have been changed several times so that the tower stands out against the buildings around it, and one newspaper account says it was white at first and gained its stripes about 1956 (reported). In June 1993 the head office of the Lighthouse Services moved in from Johannesburg, the last keeper was relocated, the light became fully automated and the keepers' quarters became offices. A former chief electrical engineer, G A Dalton, wrote that light keeping was first taught to South Africans here.

The coast here has its own sad history. On the night of 17 May 1865 the mail steamer RMS Athens left Table Bay for Mauritius, had her boilers put out by heavy seas in a north west gale and was driven onto the rocks between Mouille Point and Green Point. All 30 souls aboard were drowned, though one account says a pig reached the shore (reported). Her engine block still shows in the kelp. On the night of 1 July 1966 the SA Seafarer ran aground right in front of the lighthouse. The lens was stopped and the beam held on the ship so that helicopter crews could winch people to safety. The ship broke in two and was lost. One account counts 63 crew and 12 passengers aboard (reported).

First lit: 1824
Tower height: 16 m
Light above sea: 20 m
Light: One white flash every 10 seconds
Range: 25 nautical miles
Position: 33° 54.1' S, 18° 24.0' E

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Milnerton

Table Bay's guardian on the northern shore

Milnerton, Table Bay, Cape Town

Milnerton lighthouse stands among palm trees on Woodbridge Island, on the northern shore of Table Bay, with Table Mountain across the water. Commissioned on 10 March 1960, it lets a ship entering the bay at night tell the northern shore from the bright city lights and the competing beams of Green Point and Robben Island.

Milnerton lighthouse stands on Woodbridge Island at the northern end of Table Bay, among palm trees and seafront buildings, with a view straight across the water to Table Mountain and the city. The island takes its name from an old wooden bridge over Milnerton Lagoon. A newer bridge, built in 1987, runs beside the original, with a wooden balustrade that echoes it.

The light's job is to remove doubt. A ship entering Table Bay at night meets a muddle of bright city lights and the competing beams of Green Point and Robben Island, and Milnerton, with three flashes every 20 seconds, picks out the northern shore. It was commissioned on 10 March 1960. The office of the Chief Civil Engineer designed it, and the System Harbour Engineer of South African Railways and Harbours in Cape Town built it at an original cost of R38 320. It is a plain white concrete cylinder, 21 m tall, with a red lantern house. Its fourth order, three panel Stone Chance lens, originally lit by a 1 250 watt incandescent lamp and now by a 400 watt metal halide lamp, shines from 28 m above the sea with 800 000 candelas and carries 25 nm.

Two further lights sit in windows of the tower. A fixed red Stone Chance sector light with a 25 degree spread covers the extremities of Robben Island, and a set of alarm lights showing red, white and green faces Port Control in the Port of Cape Town so that the port can monitor the light. The tower is automated and watched by telemetry from Cape Point.

A plaque at the tower is reported to remember the wreck of the Nieuw Haarlem, one of six wrecks recorded nearby between 1647 and 1902. The light is said to be the only navigation beacon within metres of a golf course, as it shines over the 18th hole of Milnerton Golf Course.

First lit: 1960
Tower height: 21 m
Light above sea: 28 m
Light: Group flashing, three flashes every 20 seconds, with a fixed red sector over Robben Island
Range: 25 nautical miles
Position: 33° 52.9' S, 18° 29.3' E

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Slangkoppunt

The Tall White Tower Above Kommetjie's Wild Shore

Kommetjie, Cape Peninsula, Western Cape

Rising 33 m above the Kommetjie shore, Slangkop is the tallest cast iron lighthouse tower on the South African coast. It was built because fog often hid the Cape Point light, was held back by the First World War, and was lit on 4 March 1919, when an engineer's daughter threw the switch.

South of Cape Town, where the road runs out to Kommetjie, a white tower stands against the green flank of Slangkop mountain, whose name means snake head. At 33 m it is the tallest cast iron lighthouse on the South African coast. The English firm Chance Brothers made it from 286 tapering segments in 17 tiers, bolted together, for 14 358 pounds 9 shillings 1 penny.

The reason was fog. The old Cape Point light stood so high that cloud often hid it, and ships coming from the north and west lost the Robben Island light long before they picked up Cape Point's. A commission appointed on 29 September 1906 by the Governor, Sir Francis Hely Hutchinson, chose a site midway between the two, low and close to the water, and ranked it second only to Cape Agulhas in urgency. Ships were already going ashore. The steamer Clan Monroe ran onto rocks near the point in 1905, reportedly on 2 July and reportedly carrying cyanide and dynamite. Together with the Maori and Umhlali in 1901, the wreck of the Lusitania on Bellows Rock in April 1911 pushed the governments to build.

The tower was meant to be lit in 1914, and a plate above its door carries that year, but the First World War held it up. On 4 March 1919 Esly, daughter of the lighthouse engineer H C Cooper, switched it on before a small gathering of friends. The new Cape Point light followed on 11 March.

Inside, 139 steps climb through five floors to a lantern house glazed with 42 panes. In 1919 the light flashed in groups every 20 seconds, about 500 000 candelas, from a petroleum vapour burner. A 4 kilowatt electric lamp on 4 September 1936 raised it to about 16 000 000 candelas and set the present pattern of four flashes every 30 seconds. A 1.5 kilowatt lamp in 1974 brought it down to about 5 000 000 candelas, and a 400 watt metal halide lamp does the work today, reaching about 30 nm through a first order lens of four Chance panels. The commission also asked for a fog siren, but for reasons unknown none was installed. The station is still lived in and open to visitors.

One account says the log of HMS Himalaya mentions the light on 19 July 1917, nearly two years before it was formally lit. A lifebelt and a rocket from the Clan Monroe are reported to be on display at the lighthouse. The steamer Kakapo is said to have mistaken Chapman's Peak for Cape Point in a gale in May 1900 and run onto Long Beach, where she could not be refloated. Legend says her captain refused to leave and lived aboard for as long as three years (folklore, not history).

First lit: 1919
Tower height: 33 m
Light above sea: 41 m
Light: Four white flashes every 30 seconds
Range: 30 nautical miles
Position: 34° 09.0' S, 18° 19.2' E

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Cape Point

Built low to escape the cloud

Cape Point, Cape of Good Hope section of Table Mountain National Park, Cape Peninsula

The first Cape Point light sat so high that mist often hid it, so a new tower was built far lower on the cliff. Its builders dynamited a rock pinnacle to make the footing, and three year old Thurl Cooper commissioned it at sunset on 11 March 1919. It is now the most powerful lighthouse on the coast.

The first Cape Point light of 1860 stood so high that mist often hid it. A commission appointed in 1906 warned that when high fog covered it, as it frequently did, the whole coast from the range of the Robben Island light to Hangklip was left without a light. It proposed lowering the Cape Point light out of the fog belt and building a second new light at Slangkoppunt for the west coast. The want of money held the plan back. Then the wreck of the Portuguese liner Lusitania on Bellows Rock on 18 April 1911, following the wrecks of the Maori and the Umhlali, galvanised the governments of South Africa and England into action.

H C Cooper, the country's first Lighthouse Engineer, designed and built the new tower on Diaz Point, a rock pinnacle about 15 m high. Work began in 1913. The pinnacle was dynamited away in stages until what remained could carry two corners of the base, and concrete buttresses from a ledge below hold the other two. The foundation stone was laid on 25 April 1914 by Sir T R Price. A Cape Town reporter, a week before that ceremony, wrote that anyone reaching the site would need to be a fairly expert mountaineer, a tireless pedestrian and "a gymnast of some agility". Materials came from Simon's Town by ox wagon, then down the cliff on a steep tram track, and a crane lowered them over a ledge. Sand was carried up by hand from a cave, and water came half a mile by trolley.

The lighthouse was commissioned at sunset on 11 March 1919 by three year old Thurl Cooper, daughter of its designer and builder. A week earlier Cooper's daughter Esly had switched on Slangkoppunt, the partner light that the lower position made necessary. The square masonry tower is only 9 m tall, but it stands 87 m above the sea and cost 7 776 pounds 4 shillings 7 pence. A first order Chance Brothers lens of three panels gives three flashes every 30 seconds at 10 000 000 candelas, carrying 32 nm, which makes it the most powerful lighthouse on the coast. A fixed red subsidiary light marks the hazard zones of Bellows and Anvil Rocks.

Posting here was not sought after: it is the most inaccessible of any mainland lighthouse, and staff had to be fit for the strenuous daily climb. The first keeper, James Coe, who had come from Roman Rock, was paid 10 pounds 7 shillings a month, and his assistant H Franks 5 pounds 15 shillings. Mains power reached the headland in 1993, and the light is now automated.

Station established: 1860
Present tower first lit: 1919
Tower height: 9 m
Light above sea: 87 m
Light: Composite group flashing, three flashes every 30 seconds, with a fixed red sector light
Range: 32 nautical miles
Position: 34° 21.4' S, 18° 30.0' E

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10 lighthouses

The Agulhas Coast

Rugged southern headlands where two oceans meet.

Roman Rock

A tower built in the sea itself

Off Simon's Town, False Bay, Cape Town, Western Cape

Lit on 16 September 1861, Roman Rock is the only lighthouse on the South African coast built on a rock awash almost continuously at high water. Its cast iron tower took four years to raise and cracked before it was finished, and until helicopters arrived in the late 1960s a completely calm sea was needed to land men and supplies.

Most lighthouses stand on headlands. Roman Rock stands in the sea. Off Simon's Town in False Bay, a white cast iron tower rises from a rock that is awash almost continuously at high water, the only lighthouse on the South African coast built on a rock like this. In 1843 Rear Admiral Sir Josceline Percy, the Surveyor General, Colonel Michell, and others weighed the possible sites for a lighthouse in False Bay and recommended Roman Rock without hesitation, despite its cost.

The tower was designed by Alexander Gordon and prefabricated in England, and in May 1857 it was dispatched to the Cape. Putting it up took four years, because rough seas, bad weather and the need for low tide and calm water allowed only 962 hours on the rock in all, the equivalent of 96 working days. Before it was finished the cast iron plates of the ground tier cracked once two metres of the tower had been filled with concrete, and cracked again when the last metre went in. Wrought iron hoops around the base held it together, and the light was commissioned on 16 September 1861 from eight single wick burners in silvered metal reflectors. The tower stands 14 m high and cost 3 615 pounds. The cracks stayed a worry, so by the end of 1865 a granite wall 1.3 m thick and 4 m high had been built round the base, from stones of about three tons each carried out by boat, with the light kept burning throughout.

Life alone on the rock in the nineteenth century can only be imagined: cold, confined and cramped in a gale, with the comforts and company of the shore "so visibly near, yet so far". The records show dismissals for intoxication, resignations for various reasons and later requests to be taken on again. One keeper, James Coe, went on to become the first keeper at Cape Point. Reported accounts name John Williams as the first head keeper, on 110 pounds a year with assistants on 95 pounds. Until a helicopter service began in the late 1960s, men and their provisions went out by rowing boat and later by motor boat, and only a completely calm sea allowed a safe landing.

An acetylene gas flashing apparatus took over in 1919. In 1992, because of the glare of Simon's Town and the salt spray and bird droppings on the lantern glass, the light was electrified through a submarine cable, with a new optic and a glass reinforced plastic lantern house whose angled dome stops birds perching. The new lantern is reported to have been lifted into place by a Sikorsky helicopter. Today solar power drives a light that flashes once every 6 seconds and is seen about 20 nm out. The tower has worn several colours: black below and white above in 1861, red with white bands at some point between 1888 and 1902, and all white with a red dome from 1929, a dome later painted white too.

First lit: 1861
Tower height: 14 m
Light above sea: 17 m
Light: One white flash every 6 seconds
Range: 20 nautical miles
Position: 34° 10.9' S, 18° 27.7' E

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Cape Hangklip

The False Cape that gave False Bay its name

Cape Hangklip, near Pringle Bay and Betty's Bay, Overstrand, Western Cape

Lit on 25 November 1960, this concrete tower stands across the mouth of False Bay from Cape Point, which old sailors are said to have confused with its mountain. It was the first fully automated South African lighthouse with its own automatic diesel power plant, and leopard prints are still seen in the fynbos around it.

Hangklip is Afrikaans for hanging rock, and the mountain behind the lighthouse, Hangklipberg, is rendered in English as Hanging Cliff Mountain. It rises on the eastern side of the entrance to False Bay, near Pringle Bay and Betty's Bay, directly across the water from Cape Point. Sailors coming home from the east are reported to have mistaken it for Cape Point, and the Portuguese are said to have named it Cabo Falso, the False Cape, which is how False Bay is believed to have got its name. They are also said to have called it Ponta Espinhosa, the Thorny Point.

The mountain has a rougher human past too. Reports say that from about 1724 to 1747 its caves and cliffs were an outlaw haven for runaway slaves from the Company's slave lodge in Cape Town, and for deserters, and a spot on the coast near Pringle Bay is still called Drostersgat, the Deserters Cave. In the Second World War a secret radar station on the peak is said to have watched over aircraft and convoys in the bay, and its barracks became the Hangklip Hotel in 1952.

The lighthouse itself is modern. It was designed by the office of the Chief Civil Engineer and built by the System Harbour Engineer of South African Railways and Harbours for R55 484, and it was first lit on 25 November 1960. It was the first fully automated lighthouse in South Africa to have its own automatic diesel electricity generating plant, and it has no keepers: it is monitored by telemetry from Cape Point Lighthouse, home of the most powerful light on the coast.

The tower is circular concrete, 22 m tall, and is reported to have been cast in one continuous slip form pour in about seven days. It is said to have begun all white; it now wears a black band, with a red lantern house. A fourth order lens of three AGA panels flashes once every 10 seconds from 34 m above the sea, at 800 000 candelas, and is seen 25 nm out. A 400 watt metal halide lamp serves today.

The fynbos around the tower is so pristine that leopard footprints are still often seen there by visiting maintenance staff. Lighthouse Services staff say the wind here usually blows without a pause, yet on a clear windless morning the first sun throws long shadows over the carpet of fynbos and the great boulders around the tower.

First lit: 1960
Tower height: 22 m
Light above sea: 34 m
Light: One white flash every 10 seconds
Range: 25 nautical miles
Position: 34° 23.2' S, 18° 49.7' E

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Danger Point

The reef that gave the world women and children first

Near Gansbaai, Overberg, Western Cape

On 26 February 1852 the troopship HMS Birkenhead struck an uncharted rock off this headland. Soldiers held their ranks while the women and children were rowed to safety, and the Birkenhead drill became known across the world. A white octagonal tower, lit on 1 January 1895, now overlooks the reef.

Danger Point earns its name. At about 2 a.m. on 26 February 1852, on a calm moonlit night, the troopship HMS Birkenhead was steaming about three miles off the coast when she struck an uncharted rock, now called Birkenhead Rock, that lies only two metres below the surface in places and is hidden from sight in calm seas. Bound from Simon's Bay for Algoa Bay, she carried an estimated 638 people, most of them soldiers on their way to the Eighth Frontier War, asleep in their berths.

The ship was gone in less than 30 minutes. Only three of her eight lifeboats could be used, because the lowering gear had rusted and been painted over. Lieutenant Colonel Seton of the 74th Highlanders took command of the soldiers and ordered them to hold their ranks rather than leap overboard and swamp the boats. The first cutter carried the women and children, and every one of them reached safety. The tradition became known across the world as the Birkenhead drill. About 445 people died, many taken by great white sharks, which also took most of the seven horses pushed into the sea. Sixty eight men reached the shore, about 2 km away. Two boats were picked up by the schooner Lioness, and the survivors led her back to the wreck, where men who had clung to the rigging for some 36 hours were rescued. Seton and the captain, Robert Salmond, were lost. Legend says she carried about three tons of gold that has never been found: divers have found some coins but no gold (a treasure story, unproven). One maritime archaeologist notes that a wreck in Table Bay in 1842 followed the same women and children first practice without loss of life, so the Birkenhead may not have been the very first.

A lighthouse followed 43 years later. The contractor R Cochrane built the octagonal masonry tower, with John Bruce as Clerk of Works, for 11 909 pounds 11 shillings 6 pence, and it was commissioned on 1 January 1895. Painted white, with a red dome, it stands 18.3 m tall with its light 45 m above the sea, and visitors are reported to climb 99 steps to the gallery. The first lens was a first order optic of 12 Chance Brothers panels weighing more than three tons, replaced in 1970 by a much smaller three panel lens after its steel rollers and tracks wore badly. Today the light flashes three times every 40 seconds and is seen about 27 nm out. The wreck is a national monument, and in 1995 the British War Graves Committee put up a memorial nearby.

The station is still lived in. Bea Addison, a keeper's daughter who later lived on Robben Island and Bird Island, was born here in 1914, and a keeper in recent years was Colin Olivier, who lived at the lighthouse with his wife Angela. Koos de Kock, keeper from September 1986 to August 1995, is reported to have taken a visiting sheikh shark diving and to have won, in 1994, the first award for best keeper at a one man lighthouse on the South African coast.

First lit: 1895
Tower height: 18.3 m
Light above sea: 45 m
Light: Three white flashes every 40 seconds
Range: 27 nautical miles
Position: 34° 37.8' S, 19° 18.1' E

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Quoin Point

A lonely light above the graveyard of ships

Quoin Point, near Gansbaai and Elim, Overberg, Western Cape

A slim aluminium lattice tower stands on the second most southerly point of Africa, above one of the more densely packed wreck sites on the coast. Its frame once served at Cape Agulhas, and the English ship Joanna, lost nearby in 1682, gave up more than 23 000 coins when her wreck was found three centuries later.

Quoin Point is the second most southerly point of the African continent, a wind scoured peninsula on the Overberg coast between Danger Point and Cape Agulhas, reached by a rough 4x4 track. It is one of the more densely packed shipwreck sites on the South African coast, and the sea piles onto its rocks.

The first light was commissioned on 21 March 1955 on a 21 m steel lattice tower with a red and white diamond shaped daymark and an acetylene gas lantern. In 1990 a 23 m aluminium lattice tower with a red and white diamond took its place. That tower had already served at Cape Agulhas from 1968 to 1988, while the limestone lighthouse there, weathered by water penetration, was out of service, and it was moved here once the old Agulhas tower was reinstated. Today a solar powered rotating beacon flashes twice every 10 seconds and is seen about 16 nm out.

The English merchant ship Joanna, on her way from England to the East, went down just east of the point on 8 June 1682, the first English merchant ship recorded lost on the South African coast. Her remains were rediscovered exactly 300 years later, and more than 23 000 coins and a few hundred kilograms of silver were salvaged. Other wrecks are reported here too. The Danish ship Nicobar, lost in 1783 with a cargo of copper plate money, is said to have been found in 1987 by two Gansbaai fishermen in what is described as the largest copper plate money find in the world. The tanker Esso Wheeling, wrecked in 1948, is reported to have spilled oil that drifted towards Dyer Island and killed roughly a third of its African penguin colony.

People from the Moravian mission village of Elim, founded in 1824, frequently helped the survivors of wrecks here. Today the nature reserve nearby has no residents apart from the light and a few fishing cottages. They are owned by the Schipper and October families, who were granted the right to use this small peninsula by Queen Victoria after yet another English ship was wrecked on it.

Station established: 1955
Present tower first lit: 1990
Tower height: 23 m
Light above sea: 34 m
Light: Two white flashes every 10 seconds (group flashing 2)
Range: 16 nautical miles
Position: 34° 46.8' S, 19° 38.4' E

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Cape Agulhas

The lighthouse at the bottom of Africa

L'Agulhas, near Bredasdorp, Overberg, Western Cape

Lit on 1 March 1849, this banded limestone tower stands at the southernmost tip of Africa, where the Atlantic and Indian oceans officially meet. Its design drew on the Egyptian revival style and the Pharos of Alexandria. Saved from demolition by local people, it is the second oldest lighthouse still in service in South Africa.

At the southernmost tip of Africa, where the Atlantic and Indian oceans officially meet at the longitude of the cape, a banded tower has guided ships since 1 March 1849. Early Portuguese navigators named the point Cabo das Agulhas, the Cape of the Needle, because their compass needles swung about as they rounded it. The explanation is that magnetic north and true north then coincided here, so the needle had no variation to steer by. The cape was feared for its thick fog, treacherous seas and sharp reefs.

The light was won by public pressure. Michiel van Breda, a farmer of Zoetendalsvlei and the founder of Bredasdorp in 1838, had repeatedly seen the bodies of drowned men, women and children washed up on his own shore, and in 1840 he argued the case at a public meeting in Cape Town. He later gave the land for the tower, and merchants as far afield as Bombay and London added money. Colonel Charles Michell, the Cape's Surveyor General, answered the claim that careful captains needed no light by warning that such reasoning would "extinguish all the Channel and other lights". He designed the tower, and Mr William Martin built it of limestone from a ridge behind the site for 15 871 pounds.

Michell's design was influenced by the Egyptian revival style and by the legendary Pharos of Alexandria. Egyptian motifs decorate the windows beside the pylon towers, a winged sun disc crowns the main entrance, and the walls are about three metres thick at the base. In the early years the lamp burned fat from local fat tailed sheep. Reported accounts add that the foundation stone was laid on 8 January 1848 in front of Governor Sir Harry Smith, Colonel Michell and about 90 workmen.

It is the second oldest lighthouse still in service in South Africa, after Green Point. An inspection in 1960 found that water was penetrating the limestone, and demolition in favour of an aluminium tower was planned. Local people were horrified that their "grand old lady" would be destroyed, rallied against it and won. An aluminium lattice carried the light from 1968 to 1988, and the old tower became a national monument in 1973. Hercules Wessels, chairman of the Bredasdorp Shipwreck Museum, took a prominent part in the talks that saved it. Restoration began in 1982, with weathered blocks replaced by new limestone from the original quarry near the tower, and the light was recommissioned on 25 March 1988. The 150th anniversary on 1 March 1999 was marked by Minister Stella Sigcau "rekindling" the light.

Today the tower stands 27 m high and flashes once every 5 seconds with 7 500 000 candelas, seen about 31 nm out. The station has a lighthouse museum.

First lit: 1849
Tower height: 27 m
Light above sea: 31 m
Light: One white flash every 5 seconds
Range: 31 nautical miles
Position: 34° 49.8' S, 20° 00.6' E

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Cape Infanta

A quiet light for a remote river mouth

Cape Infanta, De Hoop Nature Reserve, near Infanta and Witsand, Overberg, Western Cape

South of the sleepy river hamlet of Infanta, a slim lattice tower with a red lantern stands on the wild De Hoop coast. The cape is said to be named for João Infante, captain of the second caravel on Dias's voyage of 1487 and 1488.

The lighthouse at Cape Infanta stands at the end of a rough private road through pristine fynbos in the De Hoop Nature and Marine Reserve, near the Breede River on the southern Cape coast. Close by, the river hamlet of Infanta is a scatter of holiday homes on the bank near the mouth, where anglers chase cob, garrick and grunter and a shark that locals call the taxman is said to claim the odd catch.

The light was commissioned on 15 March 1979 and built by StructAL (Pty) Ltd for R22 492. It stands on a slim aluminium lattice tower 15 m tall, with a red lantern house and a square daymark so that sailors can recognise it by day. The ground is high, which puts the light 53 m above the sea. A rotating array of sealed beam lamps in three panels gives a group of three flashes every 20 seconds at 660 000 candelas, and the light carries about 24 nm. Nobody lives at the station. It runs on mains power with a standby diesel generator and is monitored by telemetry from Cape Point Lighthouse.

The shore here is wild and exposed. A visiting photographer and a colleague from the National Ports Authority once walked along the cliff edge, climbing over russet lichen covered rocks to get as close to the sea as they could, and came back at first light the next morning hoping for the sun at their backs. There was none. Thick low cloud filled the horizon, so they sat in a crevice out of the chill wind for four hours, until a two minute break in the cloud sent a shaft of sunlight across the lighthouse and the surf. Along the cliff edge the photographer also found a wealth of tiny, tough wild plants.

The cape and the hamlet are said to be named for João Infante, captain of the second caravel, the São Pantaleão, in Bartolomeu Dias's small fleet when it rounded the southern tip of Africa in 1487 and 1488. The coast between Danger Point and Cape Infanta is reported to have claimed about 140 ships, and among the wrecks near Infanta is a ship named the Kadie, lost in 1865.

First lit: 1979
Tower height: 15 m
Light above sea: 53 m
Light: Three white flashes every 20 seconds
Range: 24 nautical miles
Position: 34° 28.3' S, 20° 50.8' E

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Ystervarkpunt

Porcupine Point and its red spiral stripe

Near Gouritsmond, Hessequa, Garden Route, Western Cape

On the quiet Hessequa coast, a candy striped tower with a red spiral band stands at Porcupine Point in a private nature reserve, between Mossel Bay and Cape Agulhas. The light began in 1964 on an aluminium lattice tower, and the present concrete tower took over in June 2006.

On the quiet coast of the Hessequa region, in a private nature reserve about 15 km west of the Gourits River mouth and between Mossel Bay and Cape Agulhas, a candy striped tower with a bright red spiral stands out against the coastal fynbos. This is Ystervarkpunt, which means Porcupine Point in Afrikaans. The origin of the name is not recorded in the sources checked, so for now it stays a small mystery. Wild candelabra lilies, bright red flowers, bloom nearby and suit the tower well.

The light was commissioned on 4 August 1964 on a 21 m aluminium lattice tower with a red lantern house, at a cost of R38 766. In June 2006 a cylindrical concrete tower took over, designed by the Structural Design Office of Transnet and built by Protekon Construction, a Transnet subsidiary. It rises 22 m, painted white with a spiral red band and a red lantern house. Its fourth order Stone Chance lens of three panels shows one flash every 10 seconds from 53 m above the sea, at 605 000 candelas, and carries 24 nm. The first lamp was a 1 500 watt incandescent lamp, and a 400 watt metal halide lamp serves today. The light is fully automated, with mains power, a standby diesel generator and telemetry monitored from Cape Point Lighthouse, so nobody lives at the station.

Gouritsmond, the nearest village, is a small, slow seaside place on the western side of the river estuary. Local accounts say that for many years the road in was gravel with 25 gates to open. Its beach is reported to hold Blue Flag status, more than 240 bird species have been recorded around it, and from June to November whales pass close to shore. The village was called Gouritzriviermond from 1915, when it became a town, until 1966.

Station established: 1964
Present tower first lit: 2006
Tower height: 22 m
Light above sea: 53 m
Light: One white flash every 10 seconds
Range: 24 nautical miles
Position: 34° 23.6' S, 21° 43.7' E

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Cape St Blaize

Where Dias landed and a cliff light followed

Mossel Bay, Garden Route, Western Cape

Above a cave with 200 000 years of human traces, a square white tower has watched over Mossel Bay since 15 March 1864. London declined to pay for it, so the town's Harbour Board built it as a harbour improvement, and its first keeper, John Armstrong, was chosen for his good character.

Mossel Bay was one of the first places on this coast where European sailors came ashore. On 3 February 1488, the Portuguese festival of São Brás, or Saint Blaize, Bartolomeu Dias sailed into the bay, found a freshwater spring near the shore and named the place Aguada de São Brás, the watering place of St Blaize. In 1601 the Dutch navigator Paulus van Caerden renamed it Mossel Bay for the mussels he found there. Local tradition adds that people on the shore drove Dias's party off with stones, and that a Portuguese sailor, Pedro d'Ataide, left a letter in a shoe near here reporting a lost fleet, which João da Nova found in 1501. That tale lies behind the town's Post Office Tree (legend, not documented history).

The lighthouse was slow in coming. The British government declined to pay for one that would serve only the harbour, and the Cape government, caught up in land struggles on its eastern border, had no money. The Mossel Bay Harbour Board found a way round in 1860: an Act of that year allowed wharfage dues to pay for harbour improvements, and a lighthouse was counted as one. John Goodman was hired to build the tower and quarters, and the English firm of Wilkin and Company supplied a fixed red light of the third order with a range of 15 nm. Building began in October 1862 on the bluff above the cape, a site chosen by the Admiralty surveyor Frances Skead, and the Board's engineer reported that the foundations stood on solid rock.

The square white masonry tower was first lit on 15 March 1864 and cost 3 608 pounds. It is only 14.9 m tall, but it stands so high on the cliff that the light shines from 73 m above the sea. The first keeper, John Armstrong, was recommended by the Harbour Board for his good character and kept on at 90 pounds a year with free quarters. He worked from a booklet of general instructions for keepers at the Cape of Good Hope, which asked for the lamp to burn bright from sunset to sunrise, and he had a flagstaff, a set of flags and a code book for signalling ships. Today a rotating lens flashes twice every 15 seconds and is seen 25 nm out.

Beneath the tower lies a cave with Middle Stone Age deposits that go back 200 000 years, and signs of later occupation by the Khoi people. Dassies scurry among the rocks below and gulls cry overhead, which has made this a favoured station for keepers and their families.

First lit: 1864
Tower height: 14.9 m
Light above sea: 73 m
Light: Two white flashes every 15 seconds (group flashing 2)
Range: 25 nautical miles
Position: 34° 11.2' S, 22° 09.5' E

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Cape Seal

The highest light on the South African coast

Robberg Nature Reserve, Plettenberg Bay, Garden Route, Western Cape

At the tip of Robberg, the Seal Mountain, a small lattice tower carries the highest working light in South Africa, recorded at 144 m above the sea. There is no road: without a helicopter the only way in is a 5 km footpath across a ravine, and for decades gas cylinders were carried along it.

Robberg means Seal Mountain. This arm of land forms the southern side of Plettenberg Bay, about midway between Mossel Bay and Cape St Francis on the treacherous Tsitsikamma coast, and it is a nature reserve of pristine, rugged and precipitous coastal forest. Its seaward tip is known as Cape Seal, and on the peak of that promontory stands the Cape Seal lighthouse, which at 144 m above the sea has the highest elevation of any working lighthouse in South Africa.

There is no road. Without a helicopter the only way in is a 5 km footpath through rough, sandy terrain, after crossing a ravine. Planning for a light between Cape St Francis and Cape St Blaize is reported to date from 1926, with Cape Seal chosen in 1937 and the Second World War slowing the work. In 1949 an aerial cableway was put up to carry the building materials across the ravine, and the light was commissioned on 11 May 1950. The first light was a 500 mm acetylene gas lantern from the Swedish firm AGA, on a 6 m steel lattice tower painted white with a yellow circular daymark, and it cost R10 963.

Gas meant cylinders, and the 12 replacement acetylene cylinders had to be carried to and fro along the footpath until 1986, when solar power was installed. A rotating Stone Chance power beacon with a 24 watt lamp took over then, and the light flashes twice every 30 seconds at 22 000 candelas and can be seen about 15 nm out. Salt air later rusted the tower badly, and a new slim white lattice tower is reported to have replaced it in 2013. No one lives at Cape Seal, and the station is not open to the public.

Station established: 1950
Present tower first lit: 2013
Tower height: 8 m
Light above sea: 144 m
Light: Two white flashes every 30 seconds
Range: 15 nautical miles
Position: 34° 06.4' S, 23° 24.3' E

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Seal Point

South Africa's tallest masonry light on a lonely cape

Cape St Francis, near St Francis Bay and Humansdorp, Eastern Cape

Lit on 4 July 1878, Seal Point at Cape St Francis is the tallest masonry lighthouse on the South African coast. Its designer, Joseph Flack, died of typhoid fever at the cape before it was finished, but the original Chance Brothers lens, eight panels ringed with prisms, is still in use.

Cape St Francis juts into the Indian Ocean, and at its tip stands Seal Point Lighthouse, the tallest masonry tower on the South African coast. Ships were lost here long before it existed: the Dutch East Indiaman Noord ran aground near the cape on 16 January 1690, the coaster Hope was wrecked a few miles to the west on 10 March 1840, and the Queen of the West and L'Agile both went ashore on 16 June 1850. As the list grew, so did the pressure on the Cape Colony government to act.

In 1871 Governor Sir Henry Barkly appointed a commission to look into lighting the colony's eastern coast. Its members travelled by ox wagon and pitched tents in remote places, and in the hills behind Seal Point they chose a site about 250 to 300 yards from the point, marked by an isolated rock about 20 feet high with a small pool at its foot, a pole wedged in a crevice at its top and a broad arrow chopped into its north face. Joseph Flack designed the tower in 1872 and served as clerk of works. The builder, B Godfrey of Cape Town, who had already built the Bird Island lighthouse, began the tough job with 12 men. Flack died of typhoid fever at the cape in 1876, before it was finished. The white tower, 28 m tall, was first lit on 4 July 1878. It cost 11 844 pounds, and its lens another 4 977.

The architecture is worth a close look: some windows sit in recessed masonry cartouches and others are round like portholes, and the front door, under a Regency style fanlight, stands in a broad white archway against yellowish natural stone. Inside, the original Chance Brothers lens, in use since 1878, has eight panels, each with upper and lower belts of refracting prisms, so eight beams sweep this dangerous coast. A 4 000 watt electric lamp was fitted on 21 February 1931, the day an electric fog signal by Julius Pintsch was installed, and today a 400 watt metal halide lamp gives 2 750 000 candelas, one flash every 5 seconds from 36 m above the sea, seen 28 nm out.

Seal Point was long among the most isolated staffed stations on the mainland. Later records say the 5 km trip from the farm Goedgeloof took three hours by horse or ox wagon, and that a keeper wound the clockwork by hand every four hours until 1959. Today the station is still manned and open to visitors, and it was declared a National Monument on 11 May 1984. Wild candelabra lilies bloom nearby, and a small beacon, the Kromme Bay light, marks the point itself. Reports add that the stone was blasted from nearby reefs, that 154 steps lead to the top and that SANCCOB once housed penguins here.

First lit: 1878
Tower height: 28 m
Light above sea: 36 m
Light: One white flash every 5 seconds
Range: 28 nautical miles
Position: 34° 12.5' S, 24° 50.1' E

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9 lighthouses

The Wild Coast and Eastern Cape

Remote headlands and river mouths from Algoa Bay north.

Deal

The aluminium tower that replaced the Donkin Hill light

North of the city centre near the Papenkuils river mouth, Gqeberha (Port Elizabeth), Eastern Cape

Deal Light is Gqeberha's working light, a plain aluminium tower rising from a bank of concrete blocks. It took over from the old Hill lighthouse in the Donkin Reserve on 1 November 1973, and its name honours pioneering fisherfolk who came from Deal in Kent.

Deal Light does not look like a postcard lighthouse. It is a slim aluminium lattice tower, 22 m high, with a square daymark and a red lantern house, standing in the Gqeberha suburb of Deal Party at the mouth of the Papenkuils River and rising from a bank of huge concrete blocks, with waves breaking at its foot. Its job is serious all the same. It is the fully automated light that took over from the old Hill lighthouse as Port Elizabeth's light.

The Hill lighthouse, the white tower in the Donkin Reserve above the town, was retired after more than a hundred years of service. By the end the spread of electric light, large city buildings, the new seaside suburb of Humewood and the towering Campanile had all compromised its beam. It had first shone on 1 June 1861 and was raised in 1929 to cope with the glare of the town, but it was discontinued on 31 October 1973, and Deal was commissioned the next day, 1 November 1973.

The name looks like a puzzle until the history is known. Deal Party remembers a small party of pioneering fisherfolk from Deal in Kent, who were allowed to settle on the outskirts of Port Elizabeth, close to the Swartkops River. One account says there were 24 of them, led by C. Gurney, and that they came with the 1820 Settlers.

Today the light flashes once every ten seconds from 28 m above the sea. A two panel array of revolving sealed beam lamps gives 592 000 candelas, which carry 24 nm. The station runs on the mains with a standby diesel generator and is monitored by telemetry from Cape Point. Nobody lives there and it is closed to visitors. The tower was built by StructAL for R55 036.

First lit: 1973
Tower height: 22 m
Light above sea: 28 m
Light: One white flash every 10 seconds
Range: 24 nautical miles
Position: 33° 54.9' S, 25° 36.9' E

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Cape Recife

The 1851 lighthouse that gives Cape Recife its name

Cape Recife Nature Reserve, southern Algoa Bay, Gqeberha (Port Elizabeth), Eastern Cape

Cape Recife has warned ships off the reefs of Algoa Bay since 1 April 1851, four days after its designer, Colonel Charles Michell, died. Its banded tower stands among shifting dunes beside a nature reserve, and inside it a Lepaute lens from Paris still turns on steel and brass rollers instead of floating on mercury.

Cape Recife marks the southern tip of Algoa Bay, south of Gqeberha, once known as Port Elizabeth. The name is Portuguese for reef, and the point has earned it. When the 1820 settlers arrived, troop ships carrying soldiers for a frontier war and a growing stream of supply vessels called at the bay. More and more of them fell prey to the gales, to Roman Rock, also called Dispatch Rock, and to Thunderbolt Reef, which is named after HMS Thunderbolt, a Royal Navy sail and paddle frigate.

The light was built on D'Urban Rock, an outcrop named for the governor Sir Benjamin D'Urban, in the midst of a vast, windswept beach of constantly moving dunes. It was the first lighthouse built in the Eastern Cape and the fourth erected by the Cape Colonial government, and it is now the third oldest still working in South Africa. Its designer, the Surveyor General Lt Col Charles Michell, drew up the plans before illness sent him home to England in February 1848. He died on 28 March 1851, aged 58, and the light was lit for the first time on 1 April 1851, four days later. William Martin built it for 17 537 pounds 10 shillings 2 pence.

The masonry tower is an octagon, 24 m high, with its light 28 m above the sea. It first wore two bands of white and red and took on its present black and white bands in 1929. Inside, a first order Lepaute lens from Paris has eight panels turning on six steel rollers, guided by six brass ones, and it is the only large lens in the country that does not float on mercury. A steady light shows red over 28 degrees of sea, which covers Roman Rock, and white over the other 332 degrees, with a group of three flashes every 117 seconds that carries 29 nm. On 18 August 1998 a bullet fired at the lighthouse smashed part of one lens panel. No maker could supply new glass, so two panels were blanked off to give the character the light shows today.

Electric light came in 1938, when two Ruston Hornsby diesel engines drove 110 volt generators; one of them now stands on display, and a wooden spiral staircase still climbs to the lantern. Before a sea wall and double storey quarters were built, high water and spring tides used to surround the lighthouse and cut the staff off from the mainland.

Beside the lighthouse lies the 370 hectare Cape Recife Nature Reserve, home to African black oystercatchers, seven species of tern including the rare roseate tern, and African penguins. A birdwatcher can see 60 of the 190 regularly occurring species in a single visit. A Second World War lookout bunker also stands in the reserve.

First lit: 1851
Tower height: 24 m
Light above sea: 28 m
Light: Fixed red over a 28 degree sector, fixed white over 332 degrees, and group flashing white and red, three flashes every 117 seconds
Range: 29 nautical miles
Position: 34° 01.7' S, 25° 42.1' E

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Bird Island

A red square tower among guano, gannets and the Doddington wreck

Bird Island, Algoa Bay, about 58 km east of Gqeberha, Eastern Cape

On a flat island in Algoa Bay, a red tower with a white cross rises out of a noisy sea of gannets and penguins. It replaced a wooden light of 1852, its keepers once sent word to Port Elizabeth by carrier pigeon, and the last of them left in July 1968.

Bird Island lies about 58 km from Gqeberha in Algoa Bay, a flat island closed to the public and a sanctuary for many thousands of birds. Cape gannets cover a vast bare stretch of ground and keep up a continual cacophony from daybreak, flying out to feed and returning to almost the same spot. Hundreds of African penguin nests are dotted through the wild spinach at the edges, and the penguins carry on unruffled even when a helicopter lands. In 1755 the East Indiaman Doddington was wrecked on the rocks around the island. Later accounts say only 23 of about 270 aboard survived, living on fish, birds and eggs for seven months until they sailed away on 16 February 1756 in a sloop they built themselves, the Happy Deliverance.

The first light, in December 1852, was a pyramid shaped wooden lighthouse, white with a broad black band, on the south side of the island. It showed two fixed white lights 5.4 m apart on a line that indicated the direction of the Doddington Rocks. Work on a masonry tower to replace it began in 1872, and its light was first shown on 1 May 1873. Mr B Godfrey of Cape Town built it, with Joseph Flack as clerk of works, for 5 337 pounds. In 1893 it was raised by 6 m and given a first order double flashing light. The square tower is 26 m high, painted red with a white band and cross, and its light stands 30 m above the sea. One account says a guard was fitted to the west window during building, to stop low flying gannets from smashing it.

Keepers and their families lived here until 1968. In the early 1900s they relied on carrier pigeons to carry messages to Port Elizabeth, until in July 1921 Bird Island and the Hill Lighthouse made the first wireless link between two lighthouses on the coast. Bea Addison, a keeper's daughter who lived on the island with her husband Tom, recalled in an interview about island life that only about ten tugs a year called and that wheat and butter were rationed just after the war. The family drank boiled rainwater, baked bread from potato yeast, lost their garden to rabbits, and sent the children to catch baby rabbits and take them back to their mothers at five o'clock. A famous guest stayed ten days: Dr Carl Gibson Hill, who came to study the birds after four years as a Japanese prisoner of war, and who left his sandals by the door when he was in his room.

The three keepers were withdrawn in July 1968. The light now runs itself, flashing twice every 20 seconds to 27 nautical miles, and technicians from Port Elizabeth fly in by helicopter every eight weeks to service it.

Station established: 1852
Present tower first lit: 1873
Tower height: 26 m
Light above sea: 30 m
Light: Group flashing, two white flashes every 20 seconds
Range: 27 nautical miles
Position: 33° 50.5' S, 26° 17.3' E

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Great Fish Point

The black and white striped tower above the Fish River mouth

Great Fish Point near the Great Fish River mouth, east of Port Alfred and near Kleinemonde, Eastern Cape

On a dune ridge east of Port Alfred, a black and white striped tower has watched over three dangerous reefs since 1 July 1898. Only 9 m tall, it stands 85 m above the sea, still turns its first order Chance Brothers lens, and still has a keeper living beside it.

The harbour at the Kowie River mouth in Port Alfred grew with the trade of the district, but its lights were poor. In January 1867 two ships' lamps on the flagstaff showed fixed green lights only 12 m above the sea, visible for three nautical miles, and captains complained. A timber light on the west pier followed, yet the Lighthouse Commission of 1890 judged it useful for the harbour alone and chose Fish Point, about 20 miles east and almost midway between Riet and Stalward Points, where three dangerous reefs had wrecked several ships.

Drifting sand ruled out building near the beach, so the tower stands on a ridge 85 m above the sea and 800 m from the shore. Work was called for at once but took seven years, partly because equipment from England was late. Messrs McAllister, Murray and Ross built the octagonal masonry tower for about 10 155 pounds, and it was first lit on 1 July 1898. It is only 9 m high, painted in bold black and white vertical stripes under a white lantern and a red dome. One account says the optic came from Birmingham with every brass joint numbered.

The first order lens by Chance Brothers has two panels and optics identical to those of the Cape Leeuwin lighthouse in Western Australia. Its glass sits on a cast iron table that floats on a bath of mercury, roughly 250 kg of it. The first lamp, a six wick oil burner, gave about 145 000 candelas. A mantle burner in 1908 raised that to 600 000, a petroleum vapour burner followed in 1928, and a 4 kilowatt electric lamp later reached 11 000 000. Today a 400 watt metal halide lamp gives one flash every ten seconds at 5 000 000 candelas, seen 30 nautical miles out. JC Robinson of the mail steamer Carisbrook Castle called the new light magnificent and thanked the Cape government for making the coast safer. The wreck of the Caraboo is reported to be visible from the site.

Getting here was once hard. Until the coastal roads were improved, only animal drawn wagons could reach the station, and every three months a local farmer brought fresh produce and stores by ox wagon. Now Port Alfred is a 15 minute drive away.

A keeper still lives on the station. Martin Peterson, described in press profiles as coming from a lighthouse family and serving as navigational officer since 2004, is pictured at the tower with fellow keeper Robert Mhlaluka and is quoted as saying that the flash counts more than the lamp. On 1 July 1998 a rekindling ceremony marked 100 years of the light, and a bronze plaque records its dedication for another hundred years. A visitor reports a stone by the road that reads Draai my om, turn me over, and on its back Nou dis beter, now it is better.

First lit: 1898
Tower height: 9 m
Light above sea: 85 m
Light: One white flash every 10 seconds
Range: 30 nautical miles
Position: 33° 31.2' S, 27° 06.5' E

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Hood Point

The 19 metre stone tower named for Lieutenant Hood, 1823

West Bank, East London, Eastern Cape

Hood Point has guided ships into East London since 4 June 1895, replacing the wooden light at Castle Point. It wore bright red and white chequers until March 1929, and it still turns a first order lens whose four flash group is unique in South Africa.

Hood Point stands on East London's West Bank, a round white tower with a grand balcony, keyhole shaped windows, a gently flared foot and a red dome under a weather vane. It crowns a green hill beside a golf course, and other keepers are said to have envied the posting, although a graveyard on the hill nearby keeps things in perspective.

The port needed it. East London's first light was Castle Point, a wooden tower on a masonry base on the rocks off the west bank of the Buffalo River mouth, listed as first lit in August 1860. Before a suction dredger arrived in 1886, few ships could cross the bar into the river, and most lay at anchor in the roadstead at the mercy of violent winter gales. As the port grew, Castle Point became inadequate, and in 1890 the Lighthouse Commission recommended a new light. The wooden tower is reported to have been demolished in 1929. A plaque at the station lists some of the roughly 200 vessels wrecked near East London since 1593.

The new light was first lit on 4 June 1895. Messrs Hendry and Pearce built the cylindrical masonry tower, with H Freeman as clerk of works, for 7 206 pounds. It is 19 m tall, and the light sits 55 m above the sea. Chance Brothers of Birmingham supplied the lantern and a first order lens of four dioptric panels, giving four white flashes every 40 seconds that reach 28 nautical miles. The optic weighs several tons yet floats almost free of friction on a bath of mercury, centred on ball bearings on a vertical shaft rather than the rollers used for other lenses of its size. A weight driven clockwork once turned it, like a grandfather clock, and the keepers wound it about three times a night.

The first lamp, a five wick Douglass burner, gave 7 000 candelas. A petroleum vapour burner in 1910 lifted that to 375 000, and electricity from the East London municipality in 1948 brought a 4 kilowatt lamp that gave 6 000 000. Today a 400 watt metal halide lamp gives 2 250 000. After thick fog put the Stuart Star ashore directly below the lighthouse, an air operated diaphone fog signal was installed eleven years later. It was withdrawn in 1984 when a nautophone went onto the harbour breakwater.

The tower did not always look so plain: it was painted in bright red and white chequers until it was repainted white in March 1929. Old maps show Point Hood, most likely after a Lieutenant Hood who helped to survey the coast in 1823. Hood Point was declared a national monument on 22 May 1998 and is still staffed. A gazette notice declared the tower and five metres of land around it a fine example of its type.

First lit: 1895
Tower height: 19 m
Light above sea: 55 m
Light: Group flashing, four white flashes every 40 seconds
Range: 28 nautical miles
Position: 33° 02.4' S, 27° 53.9' E

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Cape Morgan

Above Morgan Bay, where heavy swells make the Kei mouth tricky

Morgan Bay (Gxarha), about 3 km from Kei Mouth, Eastern Cape Wild Coast

Cape Morgan stands on the headland above Morgan Bay, just south of where the Wild Coast begins. First lit on 5 February 1964, its slim aluminium tower is one of the youngest on the coast, and a boat trip to photograph it from the sea once met a school of more than a hundred dolphins.

Cape Morgan is the headland above Morgan Bay, a quiet holiday village where a shallow lagoon meets the beach and cliff paths run high above the surf. It lies just south of the Kei River, and the Wild Coast proper begins on the far bank. The weather here is often clammy, and heavy ground swells pound the shore, so even putting a boat to sea through the Kei mouth is no easy manoeuvre, at low tide or high.

The lighthouse is one of the youngest on the Eastern Cape coast. It was first lit on 5 February 1964, built by the Cape Steel Construction Company for R35 242, and it is counted as the second youngest of the ten lighthouses on this coast, after Deal in Gqeberha.

There is nothing old fashioned about the tower. It is a slim aluminium lattice frame, 12 m high, with splayed legs, a red lantern house on top and a square daymark that makes it easier for passing ships to pick out in daylight. The light sits 61 m above the sea. A fourth order lens of three panels, a Stone Chance catadioptric system, turns to give two flashes every ten seconds, a beam of 615 000 candelas that reaches 30 nm. The first lamp was a 1 500 watt incandescent bulb; today a 400 watt metal halide lamp does the work. Nobody lives on site. The station runs on the mains with a diesel generator in reserve, and telemetry from Cape Point keeps watch over it. Until mains electricity arrived in May 1980, diesel generators ran day and night to keep the lamp burning.

The cape is named after Captain A F Morgan of HMS Barracouta, which surveyed this coastline in 1822 as part of the wider survey led by Captain W F Owen. Today the bay also carries the Xhosa name Gxarha. A boat trip to photograph the lighthouse from the seaward side once met a school of more than a hundred dolphins. Not far along the shore at Bead Beach near Double Mouth, local tradition says, carnelian beads and scraps of Ming porcelain from a 17th century Portuguese shipwreck still wash up.

First lit: 1964
Tower height: 12 m
Light above sea: 61 m
Light: Two flashes every 10 seconds
Range: 30 nautical miles
Position: 32° 42.4' S, 28° 21.9' E

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Mbashe

A red dome above the lonely Mbashe mouth

Just east of the Mbashe River mouth near Elliotdale and The Haven, Wild Coast, Eastern Cape

About halfway between East London and Port St Johns, a white steel pylon with a bright red dome rises out of the coastal forest of the Wild Coast. It was lit on 3 December 1926, twenty years after a commission warned of about 100 miles of unlit coast, and it is reached by a forest walkway and a hooped ladder.

About halfway between East London and Port St Johns, a few kilometres east of the Mbashe River mouth, a white steel lattice pylon rises out of dense coastal scrub, topped by a white lantern house, a bright red dome and a weather vane. This is the Wild Coast, where Xhosa farmers still work the rolling hills in traditional ways, the golden beaches are empty and dangerous seas have wrecked many ships. It is the part of the Eastern Cape where Nelson Mandela was born. The Haven, a rustic resort popular with fishermen and holidaymakers, lies less than a kilometre away, and riders sometimes gallop through the surf below the tower.

The case for a light was made in 1906, when the Lighthouse Commission noted that about 100 miles of coast between Cape Hermes and East London had no light at all, while ships bound for Natal hugged the shore to escape the south west current. It pictured a first order light 209 feet up, with a range of 21 miles. Nothing was done until 1923, when Commander H Strong of the Armadale Castle called for a manned light at the old Bashee beacon, an approximate midpoint between Port St Johns and East London. The engineer HC Cooper agreed, putting the cost at 10 000 pounds, and a Cape Times article on the danger to the mail steamers that passed twice a week added weight. The lighthouse and staff quarters were sanctioned in 1924, work began in 1925, and the light became fully operational on 3 December 1926. The beacon is reported to have been raised in 1892 and pulled down in 1944.

The tower was made at the South African Railways workshop at Salt River in Cape Town and cost 10 750 pounds. It is a steel lattice 14 m high with a six panel third order optic. The first lamp burned acetylene gas through a mantle. In March 1962 a 1 500 watt electric lamp, run from three automatic diesel generators, lifted the intensity from 225 000 to 3 300 000 candelas. Today a 400 watt metal halide lamp flashes in groups of three every ten seconds, reaching 28 nautical miles from 47 m above the sea.

Reaching the light is part of the visit: a long wooden walkway through the forest, then a steel ladder ringed with protective hoops, a climb for the fit and not for the faint hearted. The station is staffed and open by appointment. Older accounts say supplies came by bus from Bityi station only twice a week and post from Elliotdale, about 40 km away, and that after Transkei became independent in 1976 the lone South African keeper was replaced by one from the Transkei government.

Station established: 1892
Present tower first lit: 1926
Tower height: 14 m
Light above sea: 47 m
Light: Composite group flashing, three flashes every 10 seconds
Range: 28 nautical miles
Position: 32° 14.4' S, 28° 54.9' E

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Cape Hermes

The dark stone tower at the Gates of St Johns, since 1904

Port St Johns, Wild Coast, Eastern Cape

Cape Hermes stands above Port St Johns, where the Mzimvubu River squeezes between sandstone peaks into the sea. It began in 1903 as a ship's masthead lamp hung up as a harbour light, became a lighthouse on 16 October 1904, and once had a keeper packing his car as a grass fire closed in.

Cape Hermes is an imposing headland on the southern side of the Mzimvubu River, above the holiday town of Port St Johns. It is named after HMS Hermes, a vessel that surveyed the waters off the Pondoland coast and was itself named for the Greek god of travel and commerce. The river, whose name is Xhosa for the place of the hippopotamus, cuts a deep gorge to the sea between two great sandstone peaks, Mount Thesiger and Mount Sullivan, known as the Gates of St Johns. On 17 July 1878 Nqwiliso, eldest son of Chief Ndamase, ceded the western bank of the Mzimvubu to the Cape Colony.

At the turn of the twentieth century Port St Johns was a bustling hive of activity, with coasters loading marble quarried some 12 miles upstream. Like other minor ports on this coast it was prone to sandbars across the river mouth, and coasters often ground to an abrupt halt on them. In the end the mouth sealed with silt and the harbour was abandoned. A lamp hung like a ship's masthead light served as the harbour light from 1 May 1903, and following the Lighthouse Commission's report of 1890 the lighthouse itself was commissioned on 16 October 1904, built under HC Cooper, the Lighthouse Engineer.

The tower is quaintly squat, built of dark brown dolerite blocks quarried nearby, with white masonry finishes and a white lantern house. It is only 13 m high, but the headland lifts the light 55 m above the sea. The light flashes once every three seconds and reaches 21 nm, and with Robben Island it is one of only two South African lighthouses that flash rather than revolve. A fourth order lens arrived in 1906 and an 800 mm drum lens in 1935.

The site had to be excavated from the side of the headland, and the road up is a rough track hewn along its face, just wide enough for one vehicle, so drivers contacted the keeper before setting off. During senior keeper Bruce McWilliams's time, from 1958 to 1961, a grass fire threatened to engulf the station. He loaded his car with his prized possessions, ready to dash for Port St Johns if the road was threatened, but the fire burnt itself out. Zwelidumile Hazel Mjoji, born in Lusikisiki in 1946, became a keeper here after training at Cape Columbine in 1993, and in January 2005, after two years on Robben Island, he was, much to his delight, posted back.

As for the town's name, tradition links it to the Portuguese ship Sao Joao, though that wreck probably lies further north near Port Edward. Another account says a profile of John the Baptist can be seen in the cliffs near the river (folklore).

Station established: 1903
Present tower first lit: 1904
Tower height: 13 m
Light above sea: 55 m
Light: One white flash every 3 seconds
Range: 21 nautical miles
Position: 31° 38.1' S, 29° 33.2' E

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South Sand Bluff

The 1931 Pondoland light where the caretaker kept a shotgun for mambas

Near Mkambati (Mkhambathi) Nature Reserve, Pondoland, Wild Coast, Eastern Cape

South Sand Bluff watches the Msikaba River mouth near Lusikisiki, on a wild Pondoland coast of green hills and old wrecks. When the light first shone on 21 August 1931, 14 tons of equipment had come in by ox wagon, and its caretaker, Pangalele, was handed a shotgun to deal with black mambas.

South Sand Bluff lights one of the wildest corners of the Eastern Cape coast, at the mouth of the Msikaba River near Lusikisiki in Pondoland. Thatched huts and small vegetable gardens dot the green hills nearby, and there is a large tea plantation where Xhosa women pick the leaves and toss them over their shoulders into baskets on their backs. Close by is Mkambati Nature Reserve, whose Horseshoe Falls is said to plunge straight into the sea.

The Cape colonial government's Lighthouse Commission of 1890 was the first authoritative group to argue for a light on this part of the Wild Coast, yet the light was commissioned only on 21 August 1931, 149 years after the treasure ship Grosvenor was wrecked on this stretch of coast, with many other wrecks to follow. The Grosvenor came to grief on a stormy night in 1782, and the rumour that her cargo included the Peacock Throne of the kings of Persia is unproved, and no trace of it has been found. Building the light, under the lighthouse engineer HC Cooper, meant hauling about 14 tons of equipment by ox wagon from Lusikisiki over appalling pathways. It first shone from a 17.7 m steel lattice tower painted white, with a drum lens and an acetylene gas flasher showing three white flashes every 20 seconds.

In 1931 the vegetation around the river mouth was infested with snakes, above all the dreaded black mamba, and the chance of surviving a bite so far from help was slight. So when a local Xhosa man, Pangalele, was appointed caretaker of the installation, he was duly issued with a shotgun to protect himself and his family.

In September 1982 the light became the first in South Africa to be converted to solar power, when an electric revolving lamp lifted its beam from 2 000 to 30 770 candelas and its range from 11 to 15 nm. After the lattice tower at Doringbaai collapsed, the old frame here was replaced, as part of a plan to move to more solid towers, by the present white concrete tower, 10 m tall, in 2005. Its VEGA rotating beacon, 75 m above the sea, gives one flash every ten seconds at 59 233 candelas, reaches 18 nm and runs on solar power. Nobody lives here and the site is closed to visitors.

Station established: 1931
Present tower first lit: 2005
Tower height: 10 m
Light above sea: 75 m
Light: One white flash every 10 seconds
Range: 18 nautical miles
Position: 31° 19.6' S, 29° 57.7' E

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12 lighthouses

The KwaZulu Natal Coast

Warm Indian Ocean shores, harbours and dunes.

North Sand Bluff

Port Edward bluff light above the 1552 Sao Joao wreck

Port Edward, KwaZulu Natal south coast, north of the Mtamvuna River

A white concrete tower with a red lantern stands above Port Edward, built in 1999 after the first aluminium tower proved unstable. Near here in 1552 the Portuguese galleon Sao Joao was wrecked, and an exhibit on the first floor of the tower tells the story of her survivors' long walk.

Port Edward, the last town on the KwaZulu Natal south coast, lies a few kilometres north of the Mtamvuna River, and North Sand Bluff Lighthouse stands above it. The first light here was commissioned on 17 July 1968, on a 21 m aluminium lattice tower built by Cape Steel Construction for R57 007. It was unstable from the start. Modifications did not cure it, and the heavy cast iron lantern house made matters worse, so in 1998 it was decided to replace the frame with a solid concrete tower. The new tower, 22 m tall and painted white with a red lantern house, was designed by the Structural Design Office of Transnet, built by The Three Builders and commissioned on 12 November 1999. Its light sits 38 m above the sea, and a fourth order four panel Chance Brothers lens gives two flashes every 10 seconds at 511 000 candelas, visible 24 nm away. Mariners have to adjust their courses near this bluff in ways the charts do not show, and the light gives them a positive identification.

The bluff has a far older story. In 1552 the great Portuguese galleon Sao Joao, richly laden, was caught in a violent storm on this coast. Three heavy seas struck her abeam, her shrouds and backstays broke, and she was driven onto the shore. The old narrative of the wreck records that within four hours not a piece of the galleon as large as a man's arm remained. The survivors walked for two days without meeting a living soul, finding only a few deserted straw huts. When local people signalled that they wanted iron, the captain showed them half a dozen nails, to their great delight. The long march ended at Delagoa Bay, and the survivors reached Mozambique on 25 May 1553. The ordeal is described as the first documented meeting between the people of KwaZulu Natal and visitors from foreign cultures. The St Benedict was wrecked in 1555 near where the lighthouse now stands.

Today the first floor of the tower holds an exhibit on both wrecks, with maps and other displays. The Sao Joao account was gathered from European archives by George McCall Theal and printed for the Cape Colony government in 1898, and the St Benedict account was compiled in 2003 by Jo Arkell and Dave Watson from the narrative of Manuel de Mesquita Perestrello. Watson, who runs the Lighthouse Restaurant, curates the exhibit and is passionate about the history of shipwrecks in the region. A Portuguese Maritime Monument near the lighthouse honours the early Portuguese navigators, and researchers are reported to have found carnelian beads, porcelain shards and a bronze gun fragment near Port Edward linked to the Sao Joao.

Station established: 1968
Present tower first lit: 1999
Tower height: 22 m
Light above sea: 38 m
Light: Group flashing, two flashes every 10 seconds
Range: 24 nautical miles
Position: 31° 03.4' S, 30° 13.5' E

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Port Shepstone

The chequered cast iron tower moved from Scottburgh to the Mzimkulu mouth

Port Shepstone, Mzimkulu river mouth, KwaZulu Natal south coast

A black and white chequered cast iron tower on a grassy knoll above the Mzimkulu river mouth. It began as a light at Scottburgh marking the Aliwal Shoal and was moved here in 1906. Its story takes in a Norwegian signal keeper, Saturday rocket drills that few enjoyed, and a sea scouts rescue team.

At the mouth of the Mzimkulu, a little black and white chequered tower stands on a grassy knoll above Port Shepstone, a town named for Sir Theophilus Shepstone, a colonial statesman of note. The first vessel known to enter the river was a small coasting steamer, the Somtsue, in 1880. A wall begun by William Bazley in 1882 gave the town a working harbour by 1883. Like all harbours it needed a light, and in 1895 it got a rudimentary one: a fixed green ship's masthead lantern on a platform at the top of a ladder like frame on the southern bluff. With little other light about in those days, it served as both lighthouse and signal station, and it was manned until his retirement in 1929 by a Norwegian, E K Andreason.

The present tower had a life before it came here. It is a cast iron Chance Brothers tower that stood at Scottburgh, where in 1892 it marked the southern end of the Aliwal Shoal with a fixed red and white sector light 50 m above the sea. With its twin at Mahlongwa Head it proved confusing to mariners, and in 1906 the Scottburgh tower was dismantled, moved to Port Shepstone and given its own livery of black and white checks. It is only 8 m tall, but the knoll lifts its light 24 m above the water. The first lens was a fifth order optic of three panels, turned by clockwork and lit by acetylene gas. On 6 November 1963 a four panel AGA lens took over and the lighthouse became fully automated. Today a 400 watt metal halide lamp gives one flash every 6 seconds at 1 130 000 candelas, reaching 26 nm.

The signal station faded: the flagstaff came down in 1956, the international code flags were withdrawn and the assistant keeper's post was abolished. When the tower was built, a rocket life saving apparatus kept in a hut on the sea wall was moved into the compound, and a team of local men was recruited to work it. Few of them enjoyed the rocket drill on Saturday afternoons, so the senior keeper, A W Edwards, started a sea scouts rescue team instead, which proved popular. The tower was declared a national monument on 22 September 1995. Nobody lives here, and the light is watched by telemetry from Cape Point, but the lighthouse building houses the information office of the Hibiscus Coast Tourism Association and visitors can walk right up to the tower. In the late 2000s the region's senior lighthouse technician, Bennie van Greuning, was based at the station and looked after four other lights in the region.

Station established: 1895
Present tower first lit: 1906
Tower height: 8 m
Light above sea: 24 m
Light: One flash every 6 seconds
Range: 26 nautical miles
Position: 30° 44.5' S, 30° 27.5' E

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Ifafa Beach

The 1980 tower built after two wrecks on the Aliwal Shoal

Ifafa Beach, Ugu District, KwaZulu Natal south coast

On a low grassy rise behind the beach, Ifafa Beach lighthouse is a slim aluminium lattice tower first lit on 4 February 1980. It was set up after the Aimee Lykes ran aground and the SA Pioneer was lost on the Aliwal Shoal, and its flashes help ships steer clear.

On the KwaZulu Natal south coast, between Scottburgh and Port Shepstone, the little village of Ifafa Beach sits beside a lagoon where the Fafa River meets the Indian Ocean. The name comes from a Zulu word usually translated as sparkling, and on a bright morning it is easy to see why. On a low grassy rise behind the beach stands one of the newer and plainer lighthouses on this coast: a slim open lattice of aluminium, 23 m tall, carrying its light 35 m above the sea. It was lit on 4 February 1980, built by StructAL (Pty) Ltd for R121 622, and it exists because of trouble at sea.

The Aimee Lykes had run aground on the Aliwal Shoal, and the SA Pioneer had been lost there. Afterwards the authorities weighed up several ways to improve the marking of the shoal, and the answer was this tower. The shoal had worried mariners for a long time. Wooden beacons marked its ends by 1889, and in 1892 two cast iron lighthouses took over, one at Scottburgh and one at Mahlongwa Head. Sailors found them confusing, and in time both were moved: the Scottburgh tower to Port Shepstone in 1906, and the Mahlongwa Head tower to Cape St Lucia. A 2009 history of the country's lighthouses records no further mishaps on the shoal since the Ifafa Beach light was set up.

The light gives three flashes every 30 seconds at 89 133 candelas and can be seen 19 nm away. The first beacon in 1980 was a Pharos Marine PRB 42 rotating sealed beam unit, and in 1992 a PRB 46 rotating beacon with 3 ampere, 12 volt incandescent lamps replaced it. Nobody lives here and the tower is closed to the public. The beacon runs on mains power with batteries as back up, and the senior lighthouse technician at Port Shepstone, Bennie van Greuning, looks after it along with the lights at North Sand Bluff, South Sand Bluff, Cape Hermes and Port Shepstone itself. Together with the lights at Green Point and Port Shepstone, Ifafa Beach gives navigators bearings from which to plot a safe course, now with satellite navigation that would have astounded the old seafarers.

First lit: 1980
Tower height: 23 m
Light above sea: 35 m
Light: Group flashing, three flashes every 30 seconds
Range: 19 nautical miles
Position: 30° 27.8' S, 30° 39.1' E

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Green Point (KwaZulu-Natal)

The 1905 tower that throws a fixed red beam across the Aliwal Shoal

Clansthal, near Umzinto, KwaZulu Natal south coast

Not the Cape Town Green Point: a red and white cast iron tower on a hill above the Natal south coast, lit on 16 October 1905 to guard the Aliwal Shoal with a red sector light. Its cottage was home to Richard Wyness, a retired keeper whose lighthouse paintings hang on the walls.

High on a hill above the KwaZulu Natal south coast, a red and white banded tower looks out to sea. This is the Green Point of Natal, not to be mistaken for the one in Cape Town. Chance Brothers built it of cast iron, 22 m tall, with a white lantern under a red dome, and it was first lit on 16 October 1905 at a cost of 6 877 pounds 11 shillings 1 penny. Its light stands 86 m above the water.

The reason lies offshore. About 5 km from the coast, the Aliwal Shoal is a drowned mass of rock some 4 km long and 1 km wide. Its sharp northern tip can be glimpsed from the shore when an odd wave breaks over it, and a current of about three knots runs from south to north between shoal and shore. Ships bound for Durban sometimes thread that narrow channel, and the smallest error or drift can add them to the long list of vessels caught on the rock. By 1889 only ineffective wooden beacons marked the shoal. In 1892 two cast iron Chance towers took over, one at Scottburgh for the southern end and one at Mahlongwa Head for the northern end. Excellent in theory, they confused mariners, and relocation was proposed. The Scottburgh tower came to Port Shepstone and the Mahlongwa tower went to Cape St Lucia, while Green Point was given a completely new tower.

The first lamp burned petroleum vapour behind a second order lens of six panels and gave 240 000 candelas. On 28 November 1961 the light was electrified, and a 4 kilowatt lamp lifted the beam to 4 750 000 candelas. Today a 400 watt metal halide lamp is used, the light flashes twice every 15 seconds, and a red sector over a 169 degree arc covers the shoal. The beam reaches 30 nm. After the Aimee Lykes grounded and the SA Pioneer was lost on the shoal, a further light was added at Ifafa Beach in 1980, and there have been no mishaps on the shoal since. The tower was declared a national monument on 22 September 1995.

The station has a family story too. In the late 2000s the tower was lovingly maintained by Raymond Wyness, whose father Richard, a retired keeper and painter of lighthouses, lived in the cottage beside it with his wife Hazel. Visitors given tea there heard the couple reminisce about the old days of the service and saw the cottage walls hung with his lighthouse paintings, with a garden of neat lawns and subtropical flowers outside.

First lit: 1905
Tower height: 22 m
Light above sea: 86 m
Light: Group flashing, two flashes every 15 seconds, with a 169 degree fixed red sector over the Aliwal Shoal
Range: 30 nautical miles
Position: 30° 15.0' S, 30° 46.8' E

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Cooper

Brighton Beach tower built after the old Bluff light was pulled for guns

Brighton Beach, the Bluff, Durban, KwaZulu Natal

Most lighthouses are named after a headland. Cooper is named after a man. Perched near Brighton Beach above Durban since 1953, this red tower with a white band is one of two built to replace the old Bluff light and honours Harry Claude Cooper, South Africa's first Lighthouse Engineer.

Almost every lighthouse takes its name from the point, rock or island it stands on. Cooper is a rare exception. It is named after Harry Claude Cooper, South Africa's first Lighthouse Engineer, who had a hand in many of the country's lights. The Lighthouse Service began in 1902, when he was appointed the first lighthouse engineer to the Cape colonial government. He designed and erected the present Cape Point light, and in March 1919 his daughters switched on two new lights: Esly at Slangkoppunt on 4 March, and three year old Thurl at Cape Point on 11 March.

Cooper's own story starts along the Bluff, where Durban's first lighthouse was commissioned in 1867. A newspaper looking back in 1933 called it the only lighthouse then on the east coast of Africa. One account says that year a newspaper reported it condemned as unsafe after an earth tremor, and that Cooper replied it needed repair because of its age and poor foundations. The cast iron tower was encased in reinforced concrete to preserve it, but when South Africa entered the Second World War the tower had to give up its strategic position to heavy artillery, and it was demolished in June 1941. Cooper was one of two lighthouses built to replace it. The other was Umhlanga Rocks, a tower of the same 21 m height from the same designers and builders.

Once work finally began in 1953, the new tower went up in just six days using the moving form method, in which the shuttering is raised in small steps on screw jacks so that the pour never stops. It was commissioned on 31 July 1953 amid great pomp and ceremony, with Cooper himself in attendance. Soon afterwards Captain T W Allen, master of the Edinburgh Castle and Commodore of the Union Castle Line, called it a tremendous improvement to the approach to Durban. He reported that on a Tuesday morning his ship picked it up 32 miles off, and that its carry was remarkably good even though it was weaker than the old pre war light.

The tower is red with a single white band, 21 m tall, and its light sits 133 m above the sea. A fifth order, two panel lens gives one flash every 10 seconds, visible about 26 nm away, and a 400 watt metal halide lamp has replaced the original 1 500 watt lamp. Nobody lives here: the light runs automatically, is monitored from Cape Point and can be visited by arrangement. Its high position also makes Cooper one of four lighthouses that host the country's DGPS reference stations.

First lit: 1953
Tower height: 21 m
Light above sea: 133 m
Light: One white flash every 10 seconds
Range: 26 nautical miles
Position: 29° 56.1' S, 31° 00.3' E

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Umhlanga Rocks

The promenade tower moved to rock after the 1953 washout

Umhlanga, north of Durban, KwaZulu Natal

A white tower with a red top and a red lantern stands on Umhlanga's promenade. It was lit on 25 November 1954 as one of two new lights built after Durban's Bluff Lighthouse was pulled down for wartime guns, and it is reported to stand here because heavy rain in January 1953 washed out the first planned site.

On the promenade at Umhlanga, beside the Oyster Box Hotel, a white tower with a red top and a red lantern stands above the rocks and the long beach. It was first lit on 25 November 1954, and it exists because of a war. The Bluff Lighthouse had been the first light on the Natal coast, lit on 23 January 1867 after townsfolk had campaigned for it for years. In June 1941 it was demolished to make room for heavy artillery guns, which were mercifully never fired in anger. Two new lights were built to take over its work: Cooper Lighthouse near Brighton Beach, commissioned on 31 July 1953, and this one at Umhlanga Rocks. Soon after Cooper opened, Captain T W Allen of the Union Castle liner Edinburgh Castle said that when the Umhlanga light came into operation Durban would be very well catered for, with shipmasters able to fix their positions.

The tower was designed in the office of the Chief Civil Engineer and built by the System Harbour Engineer at Durban for R23 838. It is a cylindrical concrete shaft 21 m tall, and its light sits 25 m above the sea. A fifth order lens of three panels turns to give three flashes every 20 seconds at 600 000 candelas, a light that carries 24 nm. An opaque black panel in the optic stops the beams from disturbing the residents of Umhlanga at night as it rotates. A second, fixed red light shines over a 30 degree arc to mark water where ships may not anchor.

The station is fully automatic, with a lamp changer, duplicated lamps, lens drive units and a standby diesel generator. Nobody lives here, and the light is watched by telemetry from Cape Point Lighthouse, though visits can be arranged.

The tower is reported to stand where it does because of the weather. The first plan was to build in the grounds of the Oyster Box, but in January 1953 more than 33 cm of rain fell in under 24 hours and washed away soil near that site, and the builders chose a spot with solid rock beneath it instead.

First lit: 1954
Tower height: 21 m
Light above sea: 25 m
Light: Group flashing, three flashes every 20 seconds, plus a 30 degree fixed red sector
Range: 24 nautical miles
Position: 29° 43.7' S, 31° 05.3' E

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Tugela

White tower with black bands where the Tugela river meets the sea

Tugela Mouth, north bank of the Tugela River, KwaZulu Natal

Where the Tugela River, born high on the Mont aux Sources plateau, finally reaches the Indian Ocean, a white tower with three black bands and a red lantern keeps watch. Its light began on a lightweight aluminium frame in 1972 and now sits on solid concrete.

The Tugela is the principal river of KwaZulu Natal. It begins on the high Mont aux Sources plateau, where the Zulu name Thukela is said to mean the startling one (a popular explanation, not a settled one). From there it drops about 948 m down a series of waterfalls, runs through the Tugela Gorge and ends a 502 km journey in the Indian Ocean. Historically it marked the southern boundary of Zululand, and it was the scene of several battles in the South African War of 1899 to 1902. At its mouth, where a wooded headland meets a long beach, stands the Tugela lighthouse.

The light was first shown on 22 November 1972. The original tower was a slim, pylon like structure of aluminium lattice, 21 m tall, with a daymark. A round concrete tower later replaced it, designed by the Structural Design Office of Transnet and built by Protekon Construction, a Transnet subsidiary. It is painted white with three black bands and topped by a red lantern house. No date is given for the change, and secondary sources place it in the mid 2000s.

The new tower is 22 m tall and carries its light 46 m above the sea. A fourth order, four panel Stone Chance lens flashes four times every 30 seconds at 578 000 candelas, and the light reaches 23 nm. The first lamp was a 1 500 watt incandescent bulb, and today a 400 watt metal halide lamp does the work. Mains power is backed up by a standby diesel generator, the light is monitored by telemetry from Cape Point, and nobody lives here. The tower is closed to visitors. Photographs show the first aluminium tower still standing in 1993, and its red lantern is reported to have been moved to the top of the concrete tower, so part of the original equipment may still crown the new light (secondary sources only).

Station established: 1972
Present tower first lit: Mid 2000s
Tower height: 22 m
Light above sea: 46 m
Light: Four white flashes every 30 seconds
Range: 23 nautical miles
Position: 29° 13.4' S, 31° 30.3' E

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Durnford

The lonely Zululand cliff where cargo came through surf and Cetshwayo was exiled

Port Durnford, between Richards Bay and Mtunzini, uMhlathuze municipality, KwaZulu Natal

On a high, desolate cliff at the edge of a subtropical wilderness, Durnford light has shone since 1916 above a coast where British troops and supplies were landed in the Zulu War of 1879. That same year the captured King Cetshwayo boarded a steamer here, bound for exile.

Durnford stands on a high, desolate cliff at the edge of a subtropical wilderness, on the headland of Port Durnford between Richards Bay and Mtunzini. The headland is named after Colonel A W Durnford, the colonial engineer for Natal around 1870, who died at the Battle of Isandlwana in 1879. In that same year of the Zulu War, British troops and supplies were put ashore on the headland. Goods are also reported to have come ashore through the surf in rowing boats, before Richards Bay became a deep water port. Later in 1879, after his capture, the Zulu king Cetshwayo was taken to Port Durnford and boarded a steamer for Cape Town. It was reportedly his first sea voyage, and the ship's machinery awed him so much that he refused to go down into the engine room.

The light began on 1 March 1916 as an acetylene gas flasher on a 12 m steel lattice tower painted white, with an 800 mm drum lens and an AGA gas flasher. A young local man was reportedly paid part time to look after it, and he reported faults to a shopkeeper at Umhlatuzi (a local history account). The rusted, sea worn remains of that first tower still stand beside the present round concrete tower, which dates from March 2005. The new tower is also 12 m tall, designed by the Structural Design Office of Transnet and built by Protekon Construction, a Transnet subsidiary.

The present light is a 178.5 mm six panel VEGA rotating beacon with a 12 volt lamp. It flashes a group of four every 40 seconds at 50 538 candelas from 56 m above the sea, and is visible 19 nm out. It runs on solar power and carries a racon, a radar transponder beacon that shows ships its bearing and distance on their radar screens. Nobody lives here, and the site is closed to visitors.

Station established: 1916
Present tower first lit: 2005
Tower height: 12 m
Light above sea: 56 m
Light: Composite group of four white flashes every 40 seconds
Range: 19 nautical miles
Position: 28° 54.9' S, 31° 55.3' E

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Richards Bay

The Square Tower Everyone Still Remembers

Meerensee, Richards Bay, KwaZulu Natal

Richards Bay is still marked by light, but the tower most people picture is the square white one with a round top. Lit in 1979 and seen by a whole generation of sailors, it was taken down in 2018 when erosion came too close.

We kept Richards Bay in the KZN collection on purpose. Technically it could sit with the Elders now, but it was only taken down in April 2018, and almost everyone who sailed this coast, worked the port, or grew up in Meerensee remembers the odd square tower. No other lighthouse in South Africa looked like it: an 11 m square white concrete tower with a round top section and a white lantern house, the only one built that way. It was lit on 22 May 1979 on the dunes above the new deep water port. The Office of the Chief Civil Engineer of South African Transport Services designed it and the harbour’s New Works team built it for R202 515. Inside, a cluster of sealed beam lamps gave three white flashes every 15 seconds at 660 000 candelas, visible for 25 nautical miles. The bay itself is named for Sir Frederick William Richards, who surveyed the Zululand coast in 1879 and identified the Umhlatuzi lagoon as a future harbour. The tower was built more than 200 m back from the cliff edge. After heavy seas in March 2007 the dunes began to retreat, and by 2018 the tower had come close to toppling into the sea. Rather than let it fall, Transnet had it taken down in April 2018, under a structural engineer’s guidance. A temporary steel structure with an LED light, lit on 1 April 2018, keeps the station active. The light never went out, only the tower changed, which is why we kept the Richards Bay so many of us knew as part of KZN, not yet an Elder.

First lit: 22 May 1979
Tower height: 11 m, square base with round top
Light above sea: 72 m
Light: Three white flashes every 15 seconds
Range: 25 nautical miles
Position: 28° 46.5' S, 32° 07.7' E

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Cape St Lucia

The 1906 cast iron tower that was the most northerly light for 80 years

South of the St Lucia estuary, near Kwambonambi, iSimangaliso Wetland Park, KwaZulu Natal

A small black and white cast iron tower in the forest of iSimangaliso, 113 m above the sea, commissioned on 15 December 1906 after an earlier life at Mahlongwa Head. It was a lonely outpost, where keeper Joseph Murphy asked for the post, stayed 30 years and lived to the age of 100.

Far up the KwaZulu Natal coast, a small black and white cast iron tower stands in dense indigenous forest, about 20 km south of the Umfolozi river mouth. It is only 8 m tall, but its light sits 113 m above the sea and carries 24 nm. Chance Brothers of England made it, and it was commissioned here on 15 December 1906 at a cost of 2 806 pounds. The tower had a life before this: it and its optic first stood at Mahlongwa Head near Umkomaas, marking the northern end of the Aliwal Shoal. In August 1904 Charles J Croft, an engineer with the Natal Harbour Department, chose the new site after a trip through thick vegetation and swamp.

Cape St Lucia was a lonely outpost. Children had to go away to boarding school, medical help was very distant, and in the rainy season the station could be cut off for days. Malaria was an occupational hazard. The only reliable transport was an ox wagon to KwaMbonambi, a span of 12 oxen on an exhausting 48 hour journey made once a month. The keeper worked from 5 a.m. until 8 p.m. seven days a week and sent weather reports to Durban every three hours. Joseph Murphy, a legendary keeper, asked for the post and stayed 30 years, and he died in Durban aged 100. In the Second World War German U boats hunted these waters, and the flag flew prominently so that survivors would know they had reached friendly ground. On 12 March 1943 the keeper helped two lifeboats from the torpedoed steamer Richard D Spaight.

The first light was fixed, with an 800 mm drum lens and acetylene gas. In 1964 an automatic electric optic was installed and the radio beacon was changed over to a 220 volt supply, so that a keeper and his wife could install a fridge, a freezer and a geyser. Today a rotating four panel lens gives two flashes every 10 seconds at 600 000 candelas, backed by three diesel generator sets. For almost eighty years this was the most northerly lighthouse on the east coast, until Cape Vidal in 1985 and Jesser Point in 1986. The National Monuments Council listed the lighthouse in 1996 as conservation worthy.

In 2002 the Italian registered container ship Jolly Rubino caught fire off Richards Bay. Her crew fought the engine room blaze, then abandoned ship and were airlifted to Richards Bay, and she ran aground near the lighthouse. Keeper Japie Greeff passed information by radio through the rescue, and his family watched in alarm as a helicopter crashed on the deck, where his son Hyman was working for SMIT Salvage. No one was killed. Helson Siyabonga Jojozi arrived from Durban in November 2005, was appointed lighthouse officer in 2006 and lived at the station with his family. Later reports say the station was vandalised and stripped in 2022 and that the light has been out of service since.

First lit: 1906
Tower height: 8 m
Light above sea: 113 m
Light: Group flashing, two flashes every 10 seconds
Range: 24 nautical miles
Position: 28° 30.9' S, 32° 24.0' E

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Cape Vidal

The yellow tower in iSimangaliso, painted to stand out from green forest

Cape Vidal, iSimangaliso Wetland Park, north of St Lucia, KwaZulu Natal

A tall yellow concrete tower with a red lantern stands in the forest at Cape Vidal, first lit on 8 July 1985. The yellow was chosen to gleam against the green, and hippos damaged the perimeter fence so often that it was removed and they were granted the freedom of the lighthouse.

Cape Vidal Lighthouse stands in a nature reserve on the iSimangaliso coast, a tall yellow tower with a red lantern above the green forest. In China yellow was once reserved for the Emperor, and here it was chosen by design: it stands out against the lush vegetation, and at daybreak the 23 m reinforced concrete tower gleams like a golden monolith, a reminder of the green and gold of the Springbok rugby jersey. The Chief Civil Engineer's office of the South African Transport Services designed it, and WJM Construction of Zululand built it for R401 798. It was first lit on 8 July 1985.

The light is not a lens but an AGA array of sealed beam lamps that revolves 65 m above the sea. It gives a single white flash every 10 seconds at 690 000 candelas, and it can be seen 25 nm away. Such lamps are simple, cost efficient and effective, though they lack the artistry of the old lenses. Nobody lives at the station, it is watched by telemetry from Cape Point Lighthouse, and it is not open to the public. For less than ten months, from 8 July 1985 to 30 April 1986, this was the most northerly light on South Africa's east coast, until Jesser Point was commissioned. The yellow stayed unique among South African lighthouses until Groenriviermond came into operation in 1988, painted yellow with a black band.

The setting is part of the story. The road to the lighthouse runs through the Cape Vidal Forestry Reserve, where unusually relaxed herds of kudu graze the green hills. Hippos once wanted a short cut through the lighthouse grounds and damaged the perimeter fence so often that it needed constant repair, until the fence was removed and the hippos were granted the freedom of the lighthouse. Cape Vidal also marks the southern end of a protected marine area that runs 150 km north to the Mozambique border and three nautical miles out to sea. The cape is named for Captain Alexander Thomas Emeric Vidal, a Royal Navy surveyor who charted this coast in the 1820s.

First lit: 1985
Tower height: 23 m
Light above sea: 65 m
Light: One flash every 10 seconds
Range: 25 nautical miles
Position: 28° 08.9' S, 32° 33.2' E

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Jesser Point

South Africa's northernmost light, above the reefs at Sodwana

Sodwana Bay, iSimangaliso Wetland Park, northern KwaZulu Natal

Jesser Point is where South Africa's lighthouse chain finally ends. Set above the coral reefs of Sodwana Bay, this white tower with a red lantern first shone on 30 April 1986 and is one of the youngest lights in the country.

Sodwana Bay is the end of the line. Jesser Point is the most northerly light on South Africa's east coast, the last one before the Mozambique border. It stands at the Sodwana Bay holiday resort, inside the iSimangaliso Wetland Park, South Africa's first World Heritage Site. The resort is world renowned for scuba diving and big game fishing, and the coral reefs just offshore are the southernmost in Africa. Giant loggerhead and leatherback turtles come out of the sea to lay their eggs on the beaches in December and January.

For almost eighty years the most northerly light on the east coast was Cape St Lucia, lit in 1906. Cape Vidal took the title on 8 July 1985, and Jesser Point took it from Cape Vidal on 30 April 1986, less than ten months later. The tower is a plain white concrete cylinder 11 m tall, topped by a red lantern house of glass reinforced plastic. The Chief Civil Engineer's office of the South African Transport Services designed it and WJM Construction of Zululand built it for R421 737. Inside, a cluster of sealed beam lamps turns on a gearless pedestal, sending out four flashes every 40 seconds from 61 m above sea level at about 835 000 candelas, visible 25 nm away. The light once had a radio beacon with the call sign ZQ, but all 24 South African radio beacons were switched off on 1 April 2000, replaced by four DGPS reference stations.

Nobody lives here. No permanent quarters were allowed at the lighthouse, so visiting maintenance staff stay in a wooden cabin like those at the holiday resort next door, which replaced an earlier prefabricated building. Reports say the teams drive in from Richards Bay about every three months. They share the area with hippos, believed to cause more human deaths than any other animal in Africa, and with Nile crocodiles, hardly a welcoming committee for shipwrecked sailors. Nandipha Ngcukana, the regional manager responsible for 22 lighthouses, says her days can begin with pleading with a skipper to slow down inside a harbour and end with dashing away from a green mamba that has made a control panel its home.

Beneath the beam, in deep Jesser Canyon, divers found living coelacanths in 2000, at around 100 m.

First lit: 1986
Tower height: 11 m
Light above sea: 61 m
Light: Four white flashes every 40 seconds
Range: 25 nautical miles
Position: 27° 32.7' S, 32° 40.7' E

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6 lighthouses

The Elders: lights of the past

Six old lights that no longer shine, kept alive in the stories of the coast.

Mouille Point

A rocky point, two lights and an unfinished wall

Mouille Point, Cape Town, Western Cape

Tradition says the Dutch began a sea wall at Mouille Point and never finished it. A lighthouse followed in 1842, the second in South Africa, built because the Green Point light could not be seen from the anchorage, and it stayed in service until the breakwater light began on 15 April 1908. Its stout base survives at Granger Bay.

Long before there was a light on this point, there was a wall that was never finished. Tradition says that in 1743 the Dutch began a breakwater out from Granger Bay, to give ships shelter in Table Bay, and then gave up. The French later bent the Dutch word for it into Mouille, and the stones of that old mole are said to show at low tide (tradition, not firmly documented).

The name stayed, and in time a lighthouse joined it. Mouille Point was the second lighthouse built in South Africa, after Green Point, which was lit on 12 April 1824 and is still often mistaken for it. Green Point is called Mouille Point most probably because it stands in the suburb of that name. The need was real: because of the shape of the shoreline, the Green Point light cannot be seen from the anchorage off Cape Town harbour, and the Mouille Point light stood about 2 km closer in. The first lighthouse at Mouille Point was a stone structure, square at the base and tapering towards the top, and the book gives it no date. Like Green Point it relied on polished parabolic metal reflectors. In June 1858 the governor asked Thomas Maclear and H Wilson to report on altering the Mouille Point light, and on a lighthouse for Robben Island.

An old postcard shows the second lighthouse, a round tower banded in red and white, and its caption says it was built in 1842. A map of the Table Bay coast labels the light 1865, and other accounts describe a tower built close by for 800 pounds in January 1865, showing a fixed red light that captains complained was weak and easy to confuse with lights ashore (reported, not firmly documented). The book does not say how these dates fit together.

That same year the steamship Athens was lost nearby. On the night of 17 May 1865 the RMS Athens left Table Bay for Mauritius, had her boilers put out by heavy seas in a north west gale and was driven onto the rocks between Mouille Point and Green Point. All 30 souls aboard were drowned. One account says the only survivor was a pig that reached the shore (reported, not firmly documented). Her engine block still shows in the kelp.

The old light's work ended on 15 April 1908, when the breakwater light was established and Mouille Point lost its operational status and was discontinued. Today its thick base survives at Granger Bay, in the grounds of the Cape Peninsula University of Technology Hotel School, keeping watch over the same water.

Its brick and slate base, about 4 m high, still stands at Granger Bay in front of the Hotel School, while the older Green Point light, lit since 1824, still shines along the coast.

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Old Cape Point

The high light that the cloud kept hiding

Cape Point, Cape Peninsula, Western Cape

Lit on 1 May 1860, the first Cape Point lighthouse stood 262 m above the sea, so high that mist often hid it, and legend says the Flying Dutchman sails these waters. On the night the Lusitania struck in 1911, its keeper hurried down the cliff in the dark to warn the lifeboats. The old tower still stands.

The first Cape Point lighthouse was a 9 m prefabricated cast iron tower, made at the Victoria Foundry in Greenwich and supplied by the engineer Alexander Gordon under a contract of 1857. Gordon is said never to have visited the site, and he trusted the tower's weight to hold it down. Robert Cousins, who supervised the erection, met the Cape Point wind and bolted the structure to the rock, or it would surely have blown, keeper and assistant with it, into the sea. It was first lit on 1 May 1860, with 16 one wick burners in silvered reflectors, flashing once every 12 seconds. At 262 m above the sea it was visible for up to 36 miles in clear weather, but the height was its flaw. Mist often wrapped the peak, and the light is reported to have been hidden for as many as 900 hours a year.

These waters also belong to the legend of the Flying Dutchman. In 1680, the story goes, Captain Hendrik van der Decken, bound for Batavia, was caught in a gale off Cape Point and swore he would round the Cape even if storm tossed until Judgment Day. For that defiance he and his crew were condemned to sail on for ever. Reported sightings include one logged in 1881 by a midshipman who became King George V, and another in 1939, when more than a hundred people on the False Bay beaches saw a sailing ship vanish.

At around midnight on 18 April 1911, thick mist hid the light and the Portuguese liner Lusitania, with 774 people aboard, struck Bellows Rock and stuck fast. Keeper J E Allen telephoned Simon's Town, then hurried down the cliff in the dark, against a stiff north westerly wind, to a beach where no boat had ever been known to land successfully. He waved his lantern, whistled and shouted at the lifeboats as they headed for the surf, but was either not noticed or misunderstood. Two boats capsized in the crashing waves, and Allen did all he could to rescue those thrown out; four people died. The other boats made for open sea and were picked up by an Admiralty tug answering his call. The Portuguese government gave him a silver medal, a certificate of commendation and 50 pounds.

The old tower was superseded by the lower lighthouse of 1919 but stayed standing. It became a watch room, and after mains electricity reached the headland in 1993 it was renovated and its top section rebuilt to the original design. Today it houses a monitoring station and communications centre for the coast's lights, and an electric funicular carries visitors up to it, over a 585 m track in three minutes.

The old tower still crowns the peak as a viewpoint reached by a short climb from the funicular, while the lower light of 1919 carries on its work below the cloud.

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Hill

The lighthouse beside a grieving husband's pyramid

Donkin Reserve, Gqeberha (Port Elizabeth), Eastern Cape

In 1820 Sir Rufane Donkin raised a stone pyramid on this hill in memory of his wife Elizabeth and named a town after her. In 1861 a lighthouse joined it. The light retired in 1973, and the tower was kept as a monument and museum.

Every elder has a first story, and this hill begins with a grief. In 1820 Sir Rufane Donkin, then acting governor of the Cape, had a stone pyramid built above Algoa Bay in memory of his wife Elizabeth, who had died in India two years earlier. He named the town below Port Elizabeth for her and set the land around the pyramid aside as a reserve for everyone, for ever. The pyramid is about 10 m high, and its inscription remembers his wife as one of the most perfect of human beings.

In 1861 a lighthouse rose beside the pyramid, and for more than a hundred years it served as a major aid to navigation. It had its own firsts. In July 1921 it became the first lighthouse on the South African coast to speak to another by wireless, to Bird Island, where messages had gone by courier pigeon until then. The Hill was also the base control for the Bird Island light. From 1863 to 1930 a large, brightly coloured time ball displayed by the lighthouse was raised in stages and dropped at precisely one o'clock, later at midday, so that ships could set their chronometers, and a pair of amber lights later did the same work. Among lighthouse staff the Hill was always a popular posting because of its place in the city.

Progress caught up with it in the end. The spread of electric light, large new buildings, the suburb of Humewood and the towering Campanile, which commemorates the 1820 settlers, all compromised its beam. The tower was raised by nine metres and its light modified, but the Hill light was discontinued on 31 October 1973, and the fully automated Deal light at the Papenkuils River mouth took over the next day. The tower passed to the local municipality for preservation as a national monument and museum. The Donkin Reserve and pyramid were declared a National Monument on 8 July 1938, and the reserve was redeveloped before the 2010 World Cup with mosaics, sculptures and benches.

The tower still stands in the Donkin Reserve and can be climbed, with a tourist office in the keeper's house and a decorative light shown after dark.

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Bluff

Durban's first light, put out for the guns

The Bluff, Durban, KwaZulu Natal

Durban waited about fifteen years for its first lighthouse, which opened on the Bluff on 23 January 1867. It guided ships for nearly three quarters of a century, until war and heavy guns brought it down in June 1941.

The Bluff is the prominent ridge on the south side of the entrance to Port Natal, the obvious place for a lighthouse. A light there would be unmistakable to ships approaching from the east, and it would be the first on the Natal coast. The townsfolk campaigned for it from the early 1850s to the mid 1860s. Natal's shores were rockbound, with neither shelter nor a friendly light, and without one the pioneers feared Port Natal would stay an unlighted, unbeaconed seaport, little known to the outside world. Governor John Scott laid the foundation stone with much pomp and ceremony on 22 November 1864, and another three years passed before the light shone.

The opening on 23 January 1867 was described in a newspaper in 1933 as the consummation of a great ideal. Durbanites were always ready to make a day of a cricket match or a rifle match, and this was no trivial affair. Shops and offices closed between 10 and 11 in the morning and the town flocked to the Point. A guard of honour from the Durban Rifle Brigade and the Artillery Company waited on a cargo boat at the wharf, Colonel Bisset, the Administrator, walked slowly up the steep hill to the foot of the tower, and Mr Lamport struck up God Save the Queen. The same account honours G C Cato, Lloyd's agent at the port, who is said to have fought for some twenty years for a light on the Bluff.

The tower was cast iron. The 1933 writer called it, at the time, the only lighthouse on the east coast of Africa. It was later encased in reinforced concrete in an effort to preserve it. One account adds that in 1933 a newspaper reported it condemned as unsafe after an earth tremor, and that the lighthouse engineer H C Cooper replied that it needed repair because of its age and poor foundations.

The Second World War ended its career. The light is recorded as running from 1867 to 1940, and the tower was demolished in June 1941 to make way for heavy artillery guns, mercifully never fired in anger. One account says six inch guns of the Cape Garrison artillery had threatened its lantern windows and the mercury bath of its lens. A small temporary structure near the base filled the gap until two new lights replaced it, Cooper at Brighton Beach, commissioned on 31 July 1953, and Umhlanga Rocks. The ruins of the old tower still stand, with the Millennium Tower, home to port control, behind them.

Its work passed to the Cooper Light at Brighton Beach, lit in 1953 and still flashing every 10 seconds, and sources differ on whether part of the old base survives on the Bluff.

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Castle Point

East London's first lighthouse was made of wood

West Bank, East London, Eastern Cape

Castle Point was a wooden tower on a masonry base on the rocks off the west bank of the Buffalo River mouth, listed as first lit in August 1860. It guided ships into East London for nearly 35 years, until the stone Hood Point took over on 4 June 1895.

East London's first lighthouse was made of wood. Castle Point was a wooden tower on a masonry base, built on the rocks off the west bank of the Buffalo River mouth, so close to the water that at high tide the sea ran all around it. Lists of South African lighthouses give its first lighting as August 1860.

It served a difficult harbour. A treacherous bar across the river mouth kept most ships out, and until a suction dredger arrived in 1886 they had to lie at anchor in the roadstead, at the mercy of violent winter gales. A plaque at the Hood Point lighthouse, listing some of the roughly 200 vessels wrecked around East London since 1593, includes the barque Lady Kennaway, lost in a gale at the Buffalo mouth in 1857.

Our picture of it shows a tall tapering square tower painted in three bands, dark at the foot, white in the middle and dark at the top. A small door and window sit near the bottom, a white railed landing runs out in front, and a small glazed lantern under a dark pointed roof crowns it. It stood on a stone base with a stair climbing up to the landing.

As the port grew, Castle Point became inadequate, and the Lighthouse Commission of 1890 recommended a new light to replace it. The stone Hood Point lighthouse was first lit on 4 June 1895 and took over its work, after nearly 35 years of service. The wooden tower is reported to have been demolished in 1929, and the port's front leading light now stands on Castle Point, near where it stood. The two names are easy to muddle, and the stone tower on the hill is the one that still stands.

Our Castle Point Elder brings the wooden tower back in wood, with a natural maple base, dark Imbuia bands and a white maple band between them.

The wooden tower is gone, but Hood Point, the stone light that replaced it in 1895, still guides ships into East London.

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Old Bird Island

The first Bird Island light was wooden

Bird Island, Algoa Bay, about 58 km east of Gqeberha, Eastern Cape

The first light on Bird Island, lit in December 1852, was a pyramid shaped wooden lighthouse, white with a broad black band, showing two white lights lined up on the Doddington Rocks. A stone tower took over in 1873.

The red stone tower on Bird Island is not the first lighthouse here. In December 1852 a wooden lighthouse was raised on the south side of the low island in Algoa Bay. It was pyramid shaped and painted white with a broad black band around its middle. It showed two fixed white lights, set 5.4 m apart on a line that indicated the direction of the Doddington Rocks, where the East Indiaman Doddington was wrecked in 1755.

The island is a hard place for timber and iron. One account says that salt air and seabird droppings ate through the iron bolts that held the wooden tower together, and that much of the stone for its replacement was quarried on the island itself. Work on the masonry tower began in 1872, and its new light, a fixed red light of the third order, was first shown on 1 May 1873. Mr B Godfrey of Cape Town built it, with Joseph Flack as clerk of works, for 5 337 pounds. The wooden light had served for just over twenty years.

The stone tower was raised by 6 m in 1893 and still stands, 26 m high, a square red tower with a white band and cross, among thousands of Cape gannets and nesting African penguins. Our Old Bird Island is made of wood, as the first light was, in natural maple with dark walnut bands.

The stone tower of 1873 still stands on Bird Island, among one of the biggest colonies of Cape gannets in the world.

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