For the first time since 1905, the Moon's umbra will sweep across the Spanish mainland. From the seafront windows of abba Playa Gijón, on the curve of San Lorenzo Bay, totality will last 1 minute 45 seconds as the eclipsed Sun hangs only ten degrees above the Cantabrian Sea.
The hotel sits at 43.535° N, 5.642° W, almost on the centerline of totality. Looking west-northwest along the bay, the eclipsed Sun will be set against an open horizon over the Bay of Biscay — one of the few sea-facing vantage points inside the Spanish path.
Sunset follows totality by about an hour. The "diamond ring" emerging from second contact will be among the most photographable moments of the entire eclipse track.
A near-centerline experience: the Moon completely covers the Sun for 1 minute 45 seconds, with the corona blazing and Venus visible high in the southwest.
From a Siberian midnight Sun to a Mediterranean sunset, the umbra travels nearly 11,000 kilometres in just over two and a half hours. Two-thirds of its journey passes over open ocean.
Totality begins at sunrise above the uninhabited Taymyr Peninsula. Because it is summer above the Arctic Circle, "sunrise" arrives near local midnight. The shadow loops over the pole and drops onto the ice fields of eastern Greenland.
The umbra clips the Westfjords and races across the south-west. Reykjavík sees totality at 17:48 local time — a mid-afternoon eclipse with the Sun still well above the horizon. Maximum globally (2m 18s) occurs 45 km offshore.
The shadow makes landfall in Galicia and crosses the entire peninsula in roughly six minutes. A Coruña, Oviedo, Gijón, Burgos, Zaragoza, and Valencia all lie within the path. The Sun sits low — between 10° and 4° above the horizon.
The umbra crosses Mallorca and Menorca with the Sun barely 2° above the sea. For coastal viewers, totality and sunset fuse into a single dramatic event before the path leaves the Earth's surface entirely.
The August 2026 total solar eclipse is the first whose path of totality crosses mainland Europe since 11 August 1999, and the first to touch Spain since 30 August 1905.
This eclipse occurs only 2.2 days after lunar perigee, so the Moon's apparent diameter slightly exceeds the Sun's — magnitude 1.0386 at greatest eclipse. The path is unusually wide (around 290 km in Spain) because the Moon's shadow strikes Earth at a steep, glancing angle.
For Spain, the timing is theatrical. Totality arrives roughly an hour before sunset. The corona will appear against a deep-twilight sky, with Venus brilliant in the southwest and the silhouette of the Moon lit from behind by the diamond-ring effect just as it touches the Cantabrian horizon.
It is part of Saros series 126, a family of 72 eclipses spanning 1179 to 2459 CE. The next total eclipse on Spanish soil follows astonishingly soon — 2 August 2027, less than a year later.
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