Towns in Ceuta inside the August 2, 2027 path of totality

Observation guide

Nowhere else in Spain will see a total phase as long as Ceuta's: 288 seconds, that is four minutes and 48, ten above Tarifa and fourteen above Melilla. On that figure Ceuta should top any list, and yet it drops to 39th of 105 in the observation index, at 71.4 points. What penalises it is neither the clock nor the terrain but the hour: the total phase runs from 10:45:13 to 10:50:01, when the Strait is usually still covered.

The number is awkward, which is why it deserves to be given in full. On the daily average, Ceuta records 70 % of clear years. In the 10:00 to 11:00 window it falls to 56.7 %, the worst of the 105 municipalities on the path, with average low cloud of 23.6 % in that same hour, also the highest of the lot. Tighten the criterion to less than 10 % cloud cover and only thirteen of the thirty years analysed, 43.3 %, would have served.

On top of that, the relief cuts the view almost immediately on its western flank, which is where the shadow will come from, so there will be no spectacle of watching it come in across the horizon. None of this prevents observing the eclipse: the Sun will be 38 degrees up and no hill hides it. What the statistics say is that Ceuta holds the best prize in the country and the riskiest bet. And they say only that, because they count what happened between 1996 and 2025 and predict nothing about the day itself.

What Ceuta will see on August 2, 2027

Ceuta contributes one of the 105 Spanish municipalities inside the path of totality, and it does so with 4m 48s of totality, which is rank 1 across the whole path. Its territory falls entirely inside the shadow, so there is no district to choose here: the choice is the exact spot you watch from.

Maximum eclipse arrives at 10:47:37 mainland Spanish time, with the Sun 38° above the horizon. The path of totality is about 238 km wide here, and Ceuta sits roughly 21 km from its centre line.

The shadow will not arrive from where the Sun is: the umbra comes in from the west (261°), crossing in from the Atlantic, while the Sun sits to the east. From Ceuta the line of sight towards the umbra runs 0.4 km before the terrain cuts it off, and the margin between the Sun and the terrain profile is 38.7°: the problem here will not be the horizon, as it was in 2026, but the sky.

The mid-morning sky over Ceuta

In the 10:00-11:00 window, the hour that brackets maximum, the 1996-2025 series gives Ceuta 56.7 % of years with a clear sky.

And that number is a trap if you compare it with the daily average: Ceuta drops from 70.0 % clear days on the daily mean to 56.7 % in the hour of the eclipse. The difference is the low cloud off the Strait and the coast, which has not burned off by mid-morning. That is why every page on this site publishes the window figure and not the daily one.

The best placed towns in Ceuta

The observing index combines duration, the sky in the window around maximum and the line of sight in the direction the shadow arrives from. Ceuta scores 71.4 out of 100.

The provincial mean is 71.4 points, against 65.9 for the median of the path. Ceuta therefore sits above the path as a whole.

The index ranks the path; it is not a forecast and it knows nothing about access or parking.

Ceuta against the rest of the path

Of the 6 provinces and autonomous cities the path crosses, Ceuta ranks fifth by number of municipalities in totality, first by maximum duration and sixth by percentage of years with clear skies at eclipse time.

The Spanish path as a whole gathers 105 municipalities across 6 provinces and autonomous cities, with the longest totality in Ceuta (4m 48s) and the shortest in Casarabonela (10s).

Ceuta offers no such choice: its single municipality is the one you get, so what you decide here is not the district but the exact spot — height above the sea, a clean horizon towards the west the shadow arrives from, and distance from the coast, where the mid-morning low cloud clings hardest.