Zeebrugge Old Mole - Zeebrugge, Belgium
Lighthouse category: harbour/sector Position: 51° 21' 39.2"N : 3° 11' 2.5"E Status: active Date: 1905 Designer: not known Tower height: 60 feet Construction: round concrete tower with lantern and gallery, sited on top of a single storey, circular, concrete sevice building Colour scheme: tower unpainted, lantern white Focal plane height: 72 feet Characteristics: 12 seconds on, 3 seconds off. Displays white or red according to sector Foghorn: none Google map view: google map link |
I have only visited Belgium on one occasion and that was a port call at Zeebrugge right at the start of a Baltic Cruise onboard Cunard's Queen Victoria in June 2008. Zeebrugge is slightly odd in that it is one of the few places I have visited where I have managed to obtain (albeit not very good) photographs of lighthouses without realising I was doing so. We will look a a couple of those later (and the fact that they were by-products of ship photographs should be blindingly obvious). However, I was well aware that I was photographing this particular light. The light is located at the end of the Old Mole (Leopold II Dam) on the west side of the entrance to Zeebrugge Harbour. The lighthouse sustained heavy damage in the course of the famous British raid on Zeebrugge in April 1918 but was repaired and put back into service. As should be obvious from this photograph, the tower is also used as a convenient site for numerous other traffic control lights and signals. Although I can find no evidence that the station has anything in the way of a fog signal, the rectangular device on the building that forms the base of the tower, certainly looks as though it may have served that purpose at one time. I had no opportunity to photograph this light from the land so I am unable to provide any meaningful information regarding access.
The photograph below shows a landscape view of the light with the Belgian, Karl Doorman class frigate, Leopold I in the background.