Eclipses in Spain: solar, lunar, and what changes between them

What actually separates one path from another

The three solar paths crossing Spain this decade are always announced with the same word, eclipse, and that word hides almost everything that matters. From one to the next, what changes is the time of day, the height of the Sun above the horizon, the part of the sky to face and, above all, whether there is any instant at which the filter can come off. Anyone preparing for the 2027 eclipse with the experience of the 2026 one will get nearly every practical decision wrong: the site, the hour to leave home, and the gear worth carrying.

The figures below are not rounded popular-science numbers. They come from the same ephemeris engine that feeds the project's municipal pages, which resolves all 8,131 Spanish municipalities one by one for each event. When this page says a path reaches 3,963 municipalities, that is the count of how many of those 8,131 fall inside the outline, not an estimate scaled from surface area.

Solar altitude decides who gets to see it at all

The total eclipse of 12 August 2026 happened with the Sun between 2 and 12 degrees above the horizon depending on the municipality, and with the disc in the west-northwest, between azimuths 279 and 288. At that height the clock stops being the deciding factor and the terrain takes over: a low ridge, a line of pines or a building two hundred metres away was enough to hide the whole event. Inside a single path of totality there were excellent sites and useless ones a few hundred metres apart, and that is the lesson that eclipse leaves for the next one.

The total of 2 August 2027 inverts the problem. Totality happens in mid-morning, with the Sun between 37 and 41 degrees and in the east, between azimuths 95 and 98. At that height the skyline stops mattering: any open patch of sky will do, a courtyard, a square or your own balcony. The observer is freed from the relief of the land, and the whole planning effort moves elsewhere, to cloud cover and to reaching a very narrow path in time.

The annular eclipse of 26 January 2028 returns to the 2026 problem, and makes it worse. The ring forms with the Sun almost touching the horizon, in the west-southwest, between azimuths 239 and 246: across the reference cities the disc sits at 8 degrees in Cádiz and Huelva, 2 in València and Castelló, 1 in Tarragona and 0 in Barcelona and Girona. In 325 municipalities in the northeast the Sun sets before the ring phase ends, so the end of the eclipse happens literally below the horizon.

Total and annular are not degrees of the same thing

Maximum magnitude condenses the difference into a single number: 1.03 in 2026, 1.07 in 2027 and 0.91 in 2028. Above 1 the lunar disc is larger than the solar one and covers it completely; below 1 it does not. That 0.91 means that at maximum in 2028 a complete ring of photosphere remains around the Moon, and a partial photosphere is still a photosphere: bright enough to damage the retina without the eye giving any warning in time.

The practical consequence is the one rule on this page that admits no nuance. In 2026 and 2027 there are a few seconds, and only inside the path of totality, when the filter comes off; outside that window it is mandatory again. In 2028 no such instant exists anywhere in Spain, neither inside the annular path nor outside it. A certified ISO 12312-2 filter stays on one hundred per cent of the time, ring phase included, which is precisely when the temptation to look is strongest.

How much of Spain fits inside each path

The split is heavily uneven. The 2026 path touched 3,963 municipalities across 31 provinces, close to half the country. The 2028 one reaches 3,259 municipalities in 29 provinces, four in every ten. The 2027 one comes to 105 municipalities and 6 provinces: Cádiz, Málaga, Granada, Almería, Ceuta and Melilla. Against the national total of 8,131 municipalities, that is 48.7 per cent, 40.1 per cent and 1.3 per cent respectively.

That is the paradox almost nobody spells out. The astronomically finest of the three eclipses, the deepest and the longest, is also the one fewest people can watch from home. Nearly five minutes of totality with a high Sun is an exceptional event, but it reaches 1.3 per cent of Spanish municipalities: for almost the whole country, seeing it means travelling and booking accommodation far in advance along one very specific coastal strip.

The seconds are not worth the same in all three

Totality in 2026 lasted 110 seconds in the best municipality, on the western coast of Asturias, with a median of 90 seconds across the path. In 2027 it reaches 288 seconds in Ceuta, four minutes and forty-eight, with a median of 140. The 2028 ring holds for up to 432 seconds at Almonte, in Huelva, with a median of 347. On paper, the longest event by a wide margin is the annular one.

But those seconds are not interchangeable. The ones in a total eclipse are the only ones in which the sky genuinely darkens, the corona appears, and you can look with nothing in front of your eyes. The ones in an annular eclipse pass with the landscape still lit, under an odd metallic light, and with the filter on. Seven minutes of ring and ninety seconds of totality are not comparable experiences, and ranking them by duration is the commonest planning mistake.

One thing is common to all three: the shadow crosses the entire country in a matter of minutes. The 2026 path swept Spain between 20:26:36 and 20:33:50, the 2027 one runs between 10:44:51 and 10:52:38, and the 2028 one between 17:51:49 and 18:00:22. Seven, eight and barely nine minutes on the clock to cover the whole territory in each case.

How this section is ordered

Events that have not happened yet go at the top, each with its own countdown and the figures for its path. Below them sits the archive: past events whose pages stay online with the real timings, the maps and the entry for every municipality that was inside the path. And at the end, lunar eclipses, which run on different rules and deserve a block of their own.

That ordering is not written by hand anywhere. The page compares each event's date against the moment of the build, so the instant one of them happens it drops into the archive on its own and the next one moves to the head of the list. It is the same logic that decides which event the front page names, and it exists precisely because an eclipse site announcing in the future tense something that already happened is a broken site.