Municipalities in Madrid within the path of totality

Observation guide

The city of Madrid missed totality altogether, and that was the fact that framed everything else. The path only reached the northern edge of the region, yet it still took in 93 municipalities, nearly all of them in the sierra and the Lozoya basin. Somosierra recorded the regional maximum at 89 seconds, a little under a minute and a half. These were not the durations available in the middle of the path, but they were the most reachable ones for several million people, with everything that implied for roads and parking.

The index here stages a close contest between two criteria. La Hiruela leads on 75.9, pairing 88 seconds with a 46.3 % clear-sky rate, and Prádena del Rincón follows at 75.6 on a healthier 49 %. Somosierra, which held the longest totality in the region, slips to third at 74.9 because its 41.7 % is the weakest sky record in the group. Cervera de Buitrago (74.6) and Buitrago del Lozoya (74.4) work the other way, trading roughly ten seconds for 54.2 % and 52.2 %, the best figures of the five.

The Sun sat 7 to 8 degrees above the horizon, and in mountain country that decided who saw the eclipse and who did not: a single ridge to the west-northwest brought on an early local sunset and left the valley floors with nothing. Passes and northwest-facing slopes proved far better than towns hemmed in by hillsides. The clear-sky percentages, from 41.7 % to 59.5 % and averaging 53 %, condense three decades of Augusts between 1996 and 2025, not that evening's sky. The next total eclipse over Spain, 2 August 2027, misses Madrid entirely: its path stops at Andalusia, Ceuta and Melilla.