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

Observation guide

The total eclipse will leave Spain at Melilla, at 10:52:38. By then it will have lasted four minutes and 34 seconds there, 274 in all, the third longest figure in the country behind Ceuta and Tarifa. And unlike Ceuta, here the clear-sky statistic improves once it is fixed to the real hour: the 66.7 % returned by the daily average rises to 73.3 % between 10:00 and 11:00, and low cloud stays at 11.2 %, under half Ceuta's 23.6 %.

That nuance tells in the ranking. Melilla scores 75.9 points and comes twenty-seventh, twelve places ahead of Ceuta despite having fourteen seconds less of totality. The Sun's altitude helps too: 41 degrees, the highest anywhere on the 2027 path along with the Almería coast, and a far more comfortable position than the 2026 eclipse offered, when the disc never reached twelve degrees at any point of the mainland route.

What Melilla will not get is the shadow arriving across the horizon: the relief west of the city cuts the line of sight before the first kilometre is out, and it does so on precisely the 261-degree bearing the umbra comes in on. That costs points in the index, not in the experience, because within those 274 seconds the sky will go out just the same. That 73.3 % anticipates nothing: it comes from looking at the thirty summers from 1996 to 2025 and counting how many held clean sky at that time.

What Melilla will see on August 2, 2027

Melilla contributes one of the 105 Spanish municipalities inside the path of totality, and it does so with 4m 34s of totality, which is rank 3 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 10:50:21 mainland Spanish time, with the Sun 41° above the horizon. The path of totality is about 238 km wide here, and Melilla sits roughly 50 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 Melilla 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 41.3°: the problem here will not be the horizon, as it was in 2026, but the sky.

The mid-morning sky over Melilla

In the 10:00-11:00 window, the hour that brackets maximum, the 1996-2025 series gives Melilla 73.3 % of years with a clear sky.

Here the eclipse window and the whole-day average tell much the same story, unlike the coast of the Strait, where morning low cloud drags the mid-morning figure down in several municipalities. Mean low cloud in that hour is around 11.2 %.

The best placed towns in Melilla

The observing index combines duration, the sky in the window around maximum and the line of sight in the direction the shadow arrives from. Melilla scores 75.9 out of 100.

The provincial mean is 75.9 points, against 65.9 for the median of the path. Melilla 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.

Melilla against the rest of the path

Of the 6 provinces and autonomous cities the path crosses, Melilla ranks fifth by number of municipalities in totality, third by maximum duration and fifth 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).

Melilla 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.