Neighborhood guides
Southwest Florida does not have one set of lighting rules. The City of Naples, Collier County, Marco Island and Bonita Springs each write their own, the beach, the bay and the preserves ask different things, and a lot on acreage has problems a canal lot never will. Each guide below starts from its own place, with the sources linked where they are used.
Seven guides
Each light on this map is one guide, colored by whose rules apply there. Port Royal and Old Naples answer to the City of Naples; Pelican Bay, Vanderbilt Beach and Golden Gate Estates to Collier County; Marco Island and Bonita Springs to their own city codes. Filter by the rules, or scroll the guides and watch the map follow.
City of Naples code: what an entry column may carry, riprap shorelines and dock light, and which Gulf-front lots the city’s turtle rule reaches. Aqualane Shores is covered here too.
The historic district’s cottages, royal palms on the old streets, the pier, and the Gulf-end blocks that fall under the city’s sea turtle code.
Collier County rules, not the city’s. The Gulf-front under the county turtle code, the Clam Bay mangrove edge and the Foundation’s design review.
A public county beach that is also a nesting beach, next to Delnor-Wiggins Pass State Park, with canals and condos behind it.
A citywide one-footcandle limit at the property line, a turtle district from Cape Marco to Hideaway Beach, and burrowing owl buffers during installs.
The city’s 2023 turtle district, which reaches homes that are not on the beach, nights from sunset to sunrise, the Imperial River and Estero Bay.
Acreage: long cable runs on big lots, livestock pens and what FWC says about motion lights and panthers, and dark canal banks.
Points placed from nominatim.openstreetmap.org. Map data from Google.
A guide is written only when a place has enough of its own to say: its own code, its own beach or water, its own wildlife on record, its own kind of lot. Each one had to show at least twelve facts that are true of it and not of the neighborhood next door. Places that did not reach that are not given a page of their own; Aqualane Shores, for example, is a section of the Port Royal guide.
Every rule is quoted from the code that applies to that address and linked, with the date it was read. Where a rule could not be confirmed, such as an association’s own lighting standards that are not public, the guide says so and tells you who to ask. The guides describe each place; they do not claim we have worked in it, and the photographs are of lighting in general, not of homes in that neighborhood.
Looking for the rules themselves? See turtle-friendly coastal lighting and wildlife-friendly lighting, or ask us about your address.
