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The Last Lighthouse Keeper

What one of the last manned lighthouses in Europe taught its final keeper.

Emma Lewis
Emma Lewis

May 4, 2024 · 7 min read

The Last Lighthouse Keeper

For 34 years, Ingrid Solberg climbed the same 96 steps every evening to light a lamp that, by the end of her tenure, no ship actually needed to navigate by.

"The GPS made the light obsolete," she says. "It didn't make the watching obsolete." She kept climbing anyway, until the last manned lighthouse on her stretch of coast was automated in 2019.