Old Lighthouse

The Old Lighthouse is a squat, square tower that predates the Dutch golden age and has outlasted empires. Built in 1576, it served as the island's sole navigational light for three centuries before the newer, taller lighthouse took over. Today it stands in the middle of Borkum's old whaling quarter, surrounded by historic houses — several of which still have fences built from whale bones, a striking reminder of the industry that once defined island life here.

The tower itself is no longer climbable for safety reasons, but its ground floor hosts a permanent exhibition called Land of Discoveries, which covers archaeological finds from the nearby old Borkum cemetery and tells the island's maritime history. The whaling quarter around the lighthouse is worth wandering — the bone fences are genuinely unusual, and the scale of the old sperm whale jaws set upright gives you a visceral sense of what those expeditions involved.

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The Old Lighthouse dates to 1576, making it one of the oldest surviving lighthouses in Germany. It stands at the centre of what was once Borkum's whaling community, and the houses around it still have fences made from whale bones — jaw bones of sperm whales set upright in the ground, a practice that was once common across the East Frisian Islands as whalers brought trophies home from the North Atlantic and Arctic.