On a gorgeous but very windy day, we took our dinghy over to Lighthouse marina to see the famous island landmark.
From Wikipedia:
"Hope Town features one of the last operational kerosene-fueled lighthouses in the world. This lighthouse was built in 1862 and became operational two years later, it is striped horizontally red and white. Its light can be seen from 23 nautical miles away.
The Hope Town Lighthouse is one of only three Manual Lighthouses left in the World. It has a spring mechanism that has to be hand cranked every several hours to maintain the sequence of five white flashes every 15 seconds. The lamp burns kerosene oil with a wick and mantle. The light is then focused as it passes through the optics of a first order Fresnel lens which floats on a bed of mercury."
We climbed the very steep stairwell inside... (I think the inside color is a mixture of the red-and-white paint left over from painting the outside!)
There were a lot of interesting details inside, such as this creative doorknob.
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