PK Porthcurno is the Museum of Global Communications, at Porthcurno on the far west coast. It opened in May 1998 in the former telegraph facility, and it tells the story of the cables that came ashore here. Porthcurno was the landing point for many submarine telegraph cables, transatlantic and beyond, which made this small valley one of the busiest doorways in the world for messages.
The cable age
In June 1870 the Falmouth, Gibraltar and Malta Telegraph Company landed the first Great Britain to India cable at the beach. The first message was sent from Bombay on 23 June 1870, and public traffic opened the next day. In 1941 miners cut tunnels into the granite hillside to house the telegraphy equipment, and the facility closed in 1970, a hundred years after operations began.
Today
The collection has designated status and includes the Cable and Wireless archives and a sample of the TAT-1 cable. The museum was rebranded in 2020 as PK Porthcurno: Museum of Global Communications.
Sources
Last checked: 2026-10-11