Tour & Photo Gallery
For pictures of the new lens in the Anclote Key Lighthouse, click here.
Click below for the new pictures from October 2003. The pictures of the lighthouse were taken after restoration, and they have done a beautiful job. Click the links below to see the individual pictures:
2. Close-up of the tower itself.
Welcome to the tour of the Anclote Key Lighthouse and I hope that you enjoy it! Click on the links to link to the images that the text is describing. They link to .jpg images. Pictures were taken from 2000-2001. Remember that the lighthouse is restored now, and is completely different. This is an old tour from 2000-2001, and I will have a new tour up as soon as I get some new pictures. *Please note that links are in green also!*
I will begin with a view of the lighthouse and Anclote Key from a distance from the channel from the Anclote River. Once you get to the side of the island facing the mainland, you will get this view of the lighthouse. You can walk around the southern tip of the island to then get closer to the lighthouse. It is literally impossible to get to the lighthouse from the mainland side of the island because of extremely thick mangroves and who knows what. When you get to the picnic tables, you get this view of them. Notice the Restricted Area sign in the background. The pathway to the lighthouse is right behind the pit toilet. When you walk past the pit toilet and into the marsh, you get this view of the lighthouse. The marsh can be seen in this picture. During the summer time and warmer days, it is thriving with mosquitoes. Also during wet seasons the marsh will get wet and very muddy almost like quicksand-nasty smell too. Straight ahead is the oil house, which is outside of the fence. In this view of the inside of the oil house, you can see the shelves that once stored the oil for the lanterns long ago. There are signs of vandalism even on the oil house, as this view of the back shows. This is a view of the lighthouse when you are looking up at it from the oil house. You can see the barbed wire fence also, which has signs of people climbing over it. If you walk to the right (facing the lighthouse), you come to a site where a well (?) is. I can only assume that this structure is a well because it always has water inside of it. If you go to the left from the oil house (facing the lighthouse) you will end up at a walkway with a gate through the fence. One of my favorite pictures is the lighthouse from the walkway. This view is a close-up of the Restricted Area sign.
If you want to climb over the fence and go up into the tower, I would want to warn you of the dangers first. As the Restricted Area sign says, this site is very hazardous. There are holes in the steps, windows left un-boarded, glass on the floor, and who knows what. When you climb the tower, you run the risk of falling through and getting hurt bad.
The door, as shown in this view is still un-locked where anyone can enter if they climb the sharp barbed-wire fence. When you first enter, you can hear the wind running through the cylindrical stairway. Looking up, you see the dark spot ahead. This darkness is caused by the first window being boarded up-maybe to scare off trespassers. However, when you pass this point, it gets brighter. The windows are very close to the stairs; the bottom of it is at your ankles. These window areas are scary parts because the railing ends and all you have is a huge hole very high off of the ground. When you finally get to the top, this is what the gallery looks like: there is another set of stairs that lead to what used to be the lantern; if you look up, you can see the vent on the very top that released heat from the lens. The view out of the gallery door previews what is coming next. The scary climb was definitely-no question about it worth the beautiful view of Anclote Key. Looking west, you can see the entrance of the marsh, but you would only notice it if you have been there. You can also see the colors of the water, which are similar to the colors in the Florida Keys. Looking north, you can see the definite tree line that splits the tall trees from the low mangroves and shrubs. If you go back down to the gallery headed back down, you can see rusted through holes in the ground. This one provides an interesting view of the skeletal structure looking down. You can also see the honeycomb looking holes where glass once let light down into the gallery from the lens area. You can see a close-up of the top here taken from the marsh below. When you go back down, you notice how much steeper the stairs are then going up. When you get back down to the concrete foundation, you can look up to see the skeletal structure above. Other views of the lighthouse can be rewarding, like some of these from the beach: View 1 View 2 View 3 View 4 View 5 View 6
These two pictures are my personal favorites: View 1 View 2
I hope that you enjoyed the tour and I also hope this encouraged you to visit the paradise of Anclote Key. Click here for information on getting to Anclote Key. Some of these pictures were taken in 2000, but the pictures of the inside of the tower were taken in the summer of 2001. You may use these pictures if you wish. If you would like to make these pictures into the background on your computer, right click then go to "Set as Background." Once again, thanks for visiting and I hope you enjoyed your tour.
