The total solar eclipse of 2 August 2027 over Andalusia, Ceuta and Melilla

What changes compared with the 2026 eclipse

On 12 August 2026 the path of totality crossed Spain diagonally and touched 3,963 municipalities spread over 31 provinces, from Galicia to the Balearics. The path of 2 August 2027 touches 105 municipalities in six territories: Málaga, Cádiz, Granada, Almería, Ceuta and Melilla. It is the same phenomenon with almost the opposite geography. Where 2026 was a national event that many people watched from their own town, 2027 is a far-southern affair that nearly everybody will have to travel to.

The difference that really matters, though, is not the size of the path: it is the time of day. In 2026 maximum came with the Sun between 2 and 12 degrees above the horizon, a median of 8 degrees, and in 2,929 of the 3,963 municipalities inside that path the Sun set before the eclipse was over. In 2027 the Sun sits between 37 and 41 degrees across the whole path of totality, and there is not a single municipality in the country where it goes down before last contact.

That difference rewrites the observer's question. For 2026 this site computed the horizon profile of all 3,963 municipalities in the path: a ray march of up to 80 kilometres in the exact direction of the Sun, corrected for the curvature of the Earth and for refraction, to answer one thing only, whether a mountain was in the way. With the Sun at 8 degrees, a west-facing rock wall erased the eclipse completely, and two villages ten kilometres apart could get opposite verdicts.

With the Sun at 40 degrees that stops happening. No range in coastal Andalusia gets in the way at that altitude unless you stand literally at the foot of a cliff, so terrain goes from being the decisive factor to being a footnote. Relief no longer decides who gets to see the eclipse.

What fills the gap the mountain leaves behind is cloud and road. Mid-morning there is no terrain profile left to consult: the deciding variable is the cloud cover on that particular day, which nobody knows until the forecast of the preceding hours, plus however long it takes you to get there. And because the path covers a narrow, densely populated coastal strip, a great many people will be making that call at the same time and on the same roads. In 2026 the question was whether a mountain would block you; in 2027 it is whether there are clouds and whether you arrive in time.

Duration improves too, and substantially. In 2026 the median across the path was 90 seconds and the national ceiling was 110 seconds, at Cármenes in León. In 2027 the median rises to 140 seconds and the ceiling to 288, at Ceuta: four minutes and 48 seconds, more than double the best spot of 2026. In exchange, the internal spread is far more uneven, which is why in this eclipse the exact spot matters in a way it did not in the previous one.

The morning of 2 August, hour by hour

The partial phase begins over mainland Spain at 09:40:25 and ends at 12:15:36: two hours and 35 minutes of bitten solar disk for practically the entire country. Totality, by contrast, lasts as long as the shadow takes to sweep the south. It enters Spain at 10:44:51, at Conil de la Frontera, and leaves at 10:52:38, at Melilla. Seven minutes and 47 seconds of shadow over Spanish soil, of which no single spot receives more than 288 seconds.

That sweep runs west to east and it shows in the local times. Conil enters totality at 10:44:51 and Roquetas de Mar, at the eastern end of the path, at 10:50:24: five and a half minutes between the first municipality to go dark and the last. The timings on this site are computed municipality by municipality with the same ephemeris engine used for 2026, not interpolated from a single headline time, and those minutes of difference are exactly why it is worth looking up your own town rather than the headline.

Outside the path this is not a non-event. Magnitude runs from 1.07 inside totality down to 0.77 in the far northwest of the mainland, where Cedeira, Cerdido, Fene and Ferrol are the municipalities that see the least, and 2,021 of the country's 8,131 municipalities reach magnitude 0.90 or higher. In other words, one in four Spanish municipalities will see the Sun reduced to a thin sliver, in broad morning light, without going anywhere.

The Canary Islands fall outside the path and see only the partial phase, between 08:32:08 and 10:46:10 in local Canarian time, one hour behind the mainland.

The time of day also helps with the logistics. Anyone who does not live in the south can arrive the night before, or even that same morning, and have the whole thing done before lunch. In 2026, with maximum pressed up against sunset, the drive home happened in the dark and all the traffic piled into the same couple of hours.

The six provinces and the 105 municipalities

Counting over this eclipse's municipal dataset, 8,131 rows, gives 105 municipalities with totality and this breakdown: Málaga 55, Cádiz 30, Granada 13, Almería 5, Ceuta 1 and Melilla 1. Not one municipality inside the path lies outside those six territories.

Read as a share of each province's own territory, the breakdown says something more. Cádiz puts two out of every three of its municipalities inside, 30 of 45. Málaga, slightly more than half, 55 of 103. Granada contributes 13 of its 174 and Almería 5 of its 103. For Cádiz and Málaga this is a provincial event affecting half the province; for Granada and Almería it concerns one very specific coastal strip, the Costa Tropical and the western end of Almería, and from the rest of the province totality is simply not visible.

Ceuta and Melilla are inside in full, and not as a footnote: they are the two Spanish locations with the most totality anywhere, 288 and 274 seconds respectively. They lie further south than the mainland and therefore closer to the centre line of the path, and that is paid out in seconds.

Among the provincial capitals, two are inside: the city of Málaga with 109 seconds and the city of Cádiz with 174. Left outside are Granada, at magnitude 0.99; Seville, at 0.98; Córdoba, at 0.96; and also Antequera, at 0.99 and less than 30 kilometres from municipalities that do make it in. A magnitude of 0.99 is not 99 per cent of a totality: it is broad daylight with the Sun reduced to a filament. The difference between 0.99 and totality is not one of degree but one of category.

The case of the city of Almería deserves a warning about how to read these tables. Its entry publishes magnitude 1.00 and the municipality is still not in the path. Magnitude is published rounded to two decimals, and that 1.00 is in fact a value slightly below unity; the field that decides is the totality flag, not the rounding. If you ever see a magnitude of 1.00 with no totality duration beside it, this is exactly what is going on.

The northern limit of the path is almost a horizontal line: it stays between 36.75 and 36.81 degrees of latitude from the Atlantic all the way to western Almería. That is why the cuts inside a single province are so abrupt. Frigiliana, at 36.805 degrees, is the northernmost municipality that makes it in, with 43 seconds; Antequera, at 37.036, misses out by little more than 25 kilometres. Among the 105, Rota is the westernmost, Roquetas de Mar the easternmost, Frigiliana the northernmost and Melilla the southernmost.

From ten seconds to four minutes and 48

Inside the path, totality lasts anywhere from 10 seconds to 288. The median is 140 seconds and the quartiles are 83 and 180: the middle half of the municipalities sits between a minute and a half and three minutes. By band: 16 municipalities do not reach one minute, 29 fall between 61 and 120 seconds, 35 between 121 and 180, 15 between 181 and 240, and 10 clear four minutes.

The top of the table belongs to the Strait and the autonomous cities: Ceuta with 288 seconds, Tarifa with 278, Melilla with 274, Algeciras with 266, La Línea de la Concepción with 263, Los Barrios with 260, San Roque with 257 and Barbate with 255. At the bottom sit Casarabonela with 10 seconds, Rubite with 11, Sayalonga with 27, El Bosque with 35, Arcos de la Frontera with 36, Ítrabo with 37, Grazalema with 41 and Benamocarra with 42.

Ten seconds is being inside the path by the skin of your teeth. It is less time than it takes to pull the filter off, look up and put it back on, and in practice it means attending totality with no margin for anything else. The list of the shortest is a list of municipalities that are technically inside and, in terms of the experience, right on the border, and that is worth knowing before booking accommodation in one of them.

The cause is purely geometric: Spain occupies the northern edge of the path, not its axis. Measured north to south at the latitude of Andalusia, the path is a little over 230 kilometres wide, and its centre falls out at sea, south of the Strait. The city of Málaga is some 117 kilometres from that centre, Tarifa about 46 and Ceuta about 21. Duration grows as you go down in latitude because every kilometre southwards brings you closer to the axis of the shadow.

The province of Málaga is the perfect illustration because it contains the whole ladder. Casarabonela, at 36.795 degrees of latitude, gets 10 seconds. The city of Málaga, at 36.768, gets 109. Marbella, at 36.514, gets 196. Estepona, at 36.467, gets 216. And Manilva, at 36.353 and in the southwestern corner of the province, gets 227. That is 49 kilometres north to south and 217 seconds of difference: roughly four and a half extra seconds of totality for every kilometre you drop.

A warning about the map is in order. The municipalities on the edge sit so close to the limit that the drawn outline and the ephemerides computed for the town centre disagree by a couple of kilometres: in Casarabonela, Frigiliana or Grazalema the municipality's point falls practically on the line, and the simplified outline that gets drawn can leave them outside even though the ephemerides put them inside. Near the limit the map cannot be read at pixel level. Check municipality by municipality, and when in doubt drop a few kilometres south, which adds seconds anyway.

How far our data on the worldwide track reaches

The path of totality neither begins nor ends in Spain: the Moon's shadow draws a far longer track across the planet, and Spain is only one stretch of it. The path file this site serves covers a window from 23 degrees west to 10 degrees east and from 24 to 49 degrees north. Inside that window the shadow comes in over the open Atlantic, crosses the Strait and leaves through the eastern edge of the file still over North Africa.

Within that window the northern limit of the path can be traced precisely: it sits at 36.75 degrees of latitude on the meridian of Cádiz, rises to 36.81 at the western end of Almería and drops to 35.84 at the eastern edge of the file. That Tarifa, at 36.13 degrees, and Ceuta, at 35.89, are both inside with 278 and 288 seconds is the confirmation, in our own data, that the path crosses the Strait from side to side.

And here is what this page will not tell you. This eclipse is famous for the exceptional duration it reaches over its African stretch, and that figure circulates everywhere. It is not in this site's sources: it falls east of the window our path file covers, so we do not publish it. Copying a number that cannot be checked against your own source is precisely what this project does not do, however often it is repeated elsewhere.

If the project ever incorporates the complete path from a verifiable source, the figure will appear here with its source cited. Until then, everything this page states about the track is limited to what the data it holds actually covers.

What this site knows about this eclipse today, and what it does not

What it knows is the ephemerides, and it knows them in detail: first and last contact, entry into and exit from the path, the instant of maximum, duration of totality, magnitude, and the altitude and azimuth of the Sun for all 8,131 municipalities in the country, computed with the same engine that produced the 2026 tables. Every figure on this page comes from there, including the ones quoted in the prose.

What it does not have is publishable climatology for this path. For the 2026 eclipse the project downloaded 30 years of ERA5 reanalysis, 1996 to 2025, and aggregated it by 0.25-degree cell to give every municipality in the path its historical share of clear skies. For 2027 that extraction is half done: only four years are in the database, 1996 to 1999, and the daily aggregates rest on two of them. On that basis no clear-sky percentage gets published, because it would carry the apparent precision of thirty years and the backing of two.

Nor is there, for 2027, the terrain raster or the per-instant animated shadow that do exist for 2026. The map on this page is a path outline and a translucent fill on the same 2D engine as the rest of the site, with real panning and zoom, but without three-dimensional draping. The per-municipality sky viewer, with Sun, Moon and horizon, remains exclusive to the 2026 eclipse. With the Sun at 40 degrees that absence weighs far less than it did in 2026: the horizon no longer decides anything.

None of those gaps gets filled in with estimates. The rule in this project is that if the data is not there, it is left out and said so, and this section exists precisely to say it.