Once the city's only light source, Gibraltar Point Lighthouse on Centre Island is Toronto's most stalwart landmark. It's named for nearby sandbanks that Upper Canada Lieutenant-Governor John Graves Simcoe considered as strategically important as the rock at the mouth of the Mediterranean Sea. The lighthouse survived an 1813 American naval invasion that razed all other structures on the present-day Toronto Islands (at the time, Centre Island was a peninsula; it wasn't until 1858 that a major storm permanently severed it from the mainland), two centuries worth of rough weather and flooding, and potentially encroaching development since ceasing operations in the late 1950s.

The first 52 feet of the navigational tower were constructed of Queenston stone, probably between 1808 and 1809. Its base wall is nearly two metres thick. In 1832, a 30-foot extension was added to the structure using stone quarried in Kingston. Its ten different keepers – the first of whom, a beer-brewing Bavarian emigrant named John Paul Radelmüller, was suspiciously murdered in 1815 – lit the harbour using various fuels, including sperm whale oil, coal, electricity, and possibly even tallow candles. Gibraltar Point's is the oldest surviving lighthouse on the Great Lakes and the second oldest in Canada.

(Research and text by Alessandro Tersigni.)