The lighthouse at the eastern end of Cayman Brac's Bluff is working again after an outage this month, with the Port Authority of the Cayman Islands installing a second light at the site as a backup while the public consultation on a national park around the beacon runs into its final weeks.

The light, which stands on the cliff top roughly 150 feet above the sea at the north-eastern tip of the island, had stopped operating and was reported to the Port Authority by a Cayman Brac resident, according to a report published by the Cayman Compass on 15 October. The Department of Communications confirmed to that newspaper that the light had been restored.

"It is believed that due to the recent inclement weather experienced across the islands, the solar batteries may not be holding or receiving enough charge," Hayley Reid, public relations manager at the Department of Communications, was reported as saying. She confirmed that the Port Authority had installed an additional light as a backup measure.

The Port Authority's own website carries no notice on the October outage. Its most recent public statement on the beacon is a two-line press release dated 3 October 2020, which advised "that the Lighthouse in Cayman Brac is once more operational", without saying what had put it out of service or for how long. The Authority's 2026 Local Notices to Mariners, published in April, concern channel markers at East End and a partially submerged wreck off Grand Cayman, and make no reference to the Sister Islands.

A working aid, not a monument

The structure is often described as historic, but it remains a listed aid to navigation. The Lighthouse Directory, a reference compiled at the University of North Carolina, records the Cayman Brac East End light under Admiralty number J5240 as an active light with a focal plane of 46 metres, or about 151 feet, a figure that matches the United States National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency's List of Lights. The directory describes a 20-foot square steel skeletal tower, its lower portion enclosed, dating from the late 1930s, and notes that a solar-powered triangular tower erected in the 1980s was itself superseded when the light was moved back to the older tower in about 2009 or 2010.

The same reference lists three other lights in the Sister Islands, at the western end of Cayman Brac and at each end of Little Cayman, all of them low masts or posts of between 20 and 36 feet. The Bluff light is the only one of the four mounted on high ground, which is what gives it its range.

Vessels passing between Cayman Brac and Jamaica, and small craft without radar approaching the island's eastern cliffs after dark, are the traffic for which the light matters most. The Port Authority has not published the dates on which the light failed and was restored, and had not said whether the backup light is a permanent addition.

Crown land and the national park proposal

The outage comes as the land around the lighthouse moves through the formal process for protection under the National Conservation Act.

On 3 September 2025, Cabinet approved what its published post-meeting summary describes as "EA146 Land Purchase for Conservation in the amount of CI$5,500,000, funding it from the Environmental Protection Fund", for the purchase of Block 111A Parcel 73 and Parcels 13 to 68. The parcels lie on the Bluff around the lighthouse and had been advertised for sale on the open market earlier that year. Asked about the purchase in the Standing Finance Committee on 19 November 2025, Deputy Premier Gary Rutty MP, Minister of Tourism and Trade Development, referred to "the purchase of 125 acres of land in the Brac" and said the government was "thinking long term".

On 23 April 2026, in an Earth Day statement from the Government Caucus, the government said it had commenced the process to designate the Cayman Brac Lighthouse and its surrounding bluff, described as 125 acres of "an historic and ecologically significant site", as a protected area. Premier André Ebanks MP and Katherine Ebanks-Wilks MP, Minister for Health, Environment and Sustainability, were quoted on the wider package of protected areas announced that day; the statement said management plans for all of the areas would be developed and put to public consultation before final approval.

The National Conservation Council (NCC) opened that consultation at its general meeting on 7 August 2026, which the public could watch on the Department of Environment's YouTube channel, alongside a separate consultation on a 10.3-acre Ironwood Forest parcel in central George Town that runs over the same dates. The Cayman Brac notice invites comment on a proposal to protect Crown parcels at the north-eastern end of Cayman Brac as the Cayman Brac Lighthouse National Park, covering 211.66 acres in all. The proposed park takes in the Crown lands associated with the Lighthouse Trail, the lighthouse parcel itself, Long Beach, the adjacent Bluff face, Little Cayman Brac and Peter's Outlook. Peter's Cave itself is not included in the proposed boundary. Road access is through Major Donald Drive, Peter's Road and Spot Bay Road.

The parcels named in the NCC notice are 111A 73, 111A 72, 111A 4, 111A 3, 111A 71, 111A 70, 111A 5 and 111E 220, together with the subdivision parcels 111A 13 to 68 and the already protected NCC parcel 111A 11. The two parcel groups bought with the September 2025 Cabinet approval, 111A 73 and 111A 13 to 68, are therefore within the proposed park footprint, alongside Crown land that was already in public hands.

The NCC's stated aim is to protect the Bluff formation and its species while keeping the area open for managed public access and recreation. The Lighthouse Trail and the Long Beach footpath would be preserved and enhanced for use by residents, students and visitors, with the wider area left in its natural state. The notice lists cliff, bluff-top shrubland and coastal shrubland habitats, and names nesting Brown Boobies and White-tailed Tropicbirds, Sybil's Crownbeard on the Bluff face, bats, Silver Thatch palms, Cayman Agave and Sister Islands Rock Iguanas among the species present.

How to comment

The consultation closes on 20 November 2026. The NCC is taking submissions through an online survey linked from the Department of Environment's website, by email to conservationcouncil@gov.ky, by post to PO Box 10202, Grand Cayman, KY1-1002, and in person at the DoE's offices. Physical copies of the proposal are available at the Environmental Centre on North Sound Road in George Town and at the DoE's Cayman Brac office on West Side Road, West End. The full nomination document, which sets out the ecological assessment and the requirements for protection under the Act, is published on the conservation.ky site.

The NCC notice does not list any public meeting in Cayman Brac, and neither the notice nor the Caucus statement says who would manage the park once designated or what would happen to the lighthouse structure, which stands on Crown land within the proposed boundary but is operated as a navigational aid rather than a heritage asset. The Department of Communications was reported on 15 October to be seeking an update from the Ministry of Health, Environment and Sustainability on plans to preserve the lighthouse as a heritage site. None had been published by the time of publication.