Municipalities in Ourense within the path of totality

Observation guide

Fifteen municipalities. That was Ourense's entire contribution to the path of totality, packed into the province's northeastern corner around Valdeorras, with the city of Ourense left outside the route. Rubiá set the maximum at 68 seconds, a little over a minute. This was the edge of the shadow, where totality is short by definition and where moving a few kilometres north made a measurable difference, so picking the exact spot counted for far more here than in provinces the path crossed head-on.

Within that narrow margin the index has little room to separate anyone: the five best sites run from 62.0 to 66.5, and duration does most of the sorting. Carballeda de Valdeorras and Rubiá share the lead at 66.5, backed by 67 and 68 seconds and clear-sky rates of 40.3 % and 39.1 %. O Barco de Valdeorras (64.4) drops to 63 seconds, Vilamartín de Valdeorras (63.5) to 59, and A Rúa closes the group on 54 seconds while claiming the best sky record of the five at 41.2 %.

Ourense's advantage was the height of the Sun, which reached 10 or 11 degrees at maximum, among the most comfortable readings on the path. Even so, this is a valley boxed in by sierras, and wherever the western slopes got in the way those extra degrees saved nothing; only open ground above the valley floor did. On cloud, the province is unusually uniform, from 34.1 % to 43.9 % and averaging 39.4 %, but those are thirty-year means from 1996 to 2025, not a record of that afternoon. The next total eclipse, 2 August 2027, does not cross Galicia: its path covers Andalusia, Ceuta and Melilla.