The August 12, 2026 total solar eclipse in Palacios de Goda (Ávila)

Palacios de Goda was the best Ávila could offer that day, and that fact alone measures the size of the province's problem. Its 41 seconds of totality, between 20:31:03 and 20:31:44, led the 14 Ávila municipalities inside the band, and its 60.7 points led the provincial index. In the national ranking, however, those same 41 seconds fall to 3,615th place among the 3,963 municipalities the total shadow reached in Spain.

Neither the sky nor the ground was to blame. At 813 metres, out on the plain of the Arévalo country, the town had 8.1 degrees of horizon clearance and a 52.7% clear rate for the date in the sample that begins in 1996, figures many places in the northern half of the peninsula would have signed for. It was pure geometry: at 41.111 degrees north, Palacios de Goda was the northernmost of the five towns at the head of the Ávila table, and further north, in the neighbouring province, the shadow widened fast.