Maine Lighthouses Ranked by Visitors

Portland Head is the one on the postcard. Commissioned in 1791 and lit while George Washington was president, it stands on a granite headland at the mouth of Casco Bay with Fort Williams Park spread out behind it, and it collects more reviews than the other thirty-nine lighthouses in this ranking put together.

That popularity is the thing to plan around. The park is free and open dawn to dusk, the car parks fill by mid-morning through July and August, and the classic view, the one you already have in your head, is from the lawn south of the tower rather than from beside it. Come at first light or in the last hour before dusk and you get the same picture with a fraction of the people.

The tower itself is not open to climb. The keepers' house is a museum with a separate admission and its own shorter season, so check before you build a day around going inside. Most visitors never do: they walk the shoreline path, look at the light from three or four angles, and leave.

Worth knowing that the number below splits in two. The lighthouse carries most of the reviews, and Fort Williams Park, the field you stand in to see it, carries thousands more of its own. Both are counted here, separately, because they are two places on Google and one place on the ground.

Bass Harbor Head sits on the south-western corner of Mount Desert Island, inside Acadia National Park but a long way from the Park Loop Road crowds. It ranks second here almost entirely because of what surrounds it: this is the lighthouse people add to an Acadia day, not one they drive to Maine for.

The view everyone wants is not from the top of the steps. It is from the rocks below and to the west, reached by a short staircase down from the car park, where you can frame the tower against the water at sunset. The rocks are uneven and slick when wet, and the light in the last half hour of the day is the reason the small car park is a scrum in August.

It is an active Coast Guard station and the grounds around the keeper's house are closed, so this is a place you look at rather than go into. Fifteen minutes is a full visit unless you are waiting for the sun.

Owls Head is small, which is the surprise. The tower is barely thirty feet tall because it does not need to be: it stands on an eighty-foot headland, so the light sits high above the water regardless. From the car park a wooden staircase climbs through spruce to the light and a view straight down the west side of Penobscot Bay.

It is the busiest light on the midcoast and still nothing like Portland Head. The grounds are open year round, the walk is a few hundred yards, and the whole thing takes half an hour unless you go down to the beach below, which most people skip and shouldn't.

The keeper's house is a museum run by the American Lighthouse Foundation with a short summer season, and the tower opens for climbing only on limited days. Check before travelling if going up is the point of the trip.

West Quoddy Head is the one with the candy stripes, and it marks the easternmost land in the United States. That is a genuine superlative rather than a marketing one, and it is why people drive two and a half hours past Acadia to stand here.

The stripes are not decorative. They are a daymark, painted so the tower reads as a navigation aid against snow and fog in a place that gets a great deal of both. The surrounding Quoddy Head State Park has coastal trail along the cliffs with views to Grand Manan, and the tide here runs to some of the largest ranges anywhere in the country.

On the first-light question the honest answer is seasonal, and we work it out day by day on our first sunrise tracker: West Quoddy holds the claim through the shoulder seasons, Cadillac Mountain takes it around midwinter, and Mars Hill has it for most of the summer. Anyone who tells you one place owns it year round has not checked.

The park charges admission in season and the keeper's house has a small visitor centre. The tower is not open to climb.

Marshall Point is a small light at the end of a long peninsula, and it is famous for a scene in a film. The short wooden walkway out to the tower is where Forrest Gump ends his run, and a steady fraction of the people here have come for exactly that.

It rewards the ones who came for other reasons too. The keeper's house holds a genuinely good small museum about the granite trade and the fishing that built this coast, run by volunteers with a short season and free admission. The setting, at the mouth of the St. George River looking out toward Monhegan, is the kind of working waterfront that most lighthouse car parks are not.

Port Clyde, a mile back up the road, is where the Monhegan ferry leaves from, so this pairs naturally with a boat day rather than being a stop on the way to anywhere.

Cape Neddick Light, universally called the Nubble, stands on a small rock island separated from the mainland by a narrow channel. You cannot walk to it, and that is the whole appeal: the tower, the keeper's house and the outbuildings sit together on their island as a complete composition, viewed from Sohier Park across the water.

Sohier Park has a car park, a gift shop and no admission charge, and it is one of the easiest lighthouse views in Maine to reach, which is why it is busy. The light gets decorated and lit for Christmas, and the town also lights it in late July, an event that fills York.

Because the island is closed to the public, this is a fifteen-minute stop, and the interesting part is finding the angle. Most people photograph it from the railing directly opposite; walking left along the rocks gives you the tower with open ocean behind it instead of a car park.