The Port Adelaide Lighthouse stands on North Parade, an 1869 cast-iron tower that guided ships through the shallow harbour approaches for over a century. It is now part of the South Australian Maritime Museum complex, and visitors can climb the 27-metre tower for views over the inner harbour and across the flat coastal plain to Adelaide.
The lighthouse is an unusual structure for Australia: cast iron rather than stone or brick, painted white, with a graceful taper and a lantern room that still contains the original optic. The inner harbour setting — surrounded by old warehouses, the clipper ship, and working port infrastructure — makes it more photogenic than the average lighthouse. The climb is 89 steps.