How Asturias met a historic eclipse with clouds, traffic, and silence

The Moon’s shadow made landfall in Spain at 20:26:31, at two points at once: Estaca de Bares in Galicia and Cabo Peñas in Asturias. Asturias and Galicia were the eclipse’s gateway into Spain. The shadow crossed Spain at about 7,000 kilometers per hour, accelerating to roughly 19,000 km/h before leaving the country seven and a half minutes later. In four municipalities in western Asturias — El Franco, Navia, Villayón and Salas — totality lasted 1 minute 50 seconds, longer than anywhere else on Spanish soil. In Oviedo, from 20:27:00 to 20:28:48, it lasted 1 minute 48 seconds: the longest of any Spanish provincial capital. All of it according to the calculations of the National Geographic Institute, the IGN.

The cape that was closed off

By six in the evening the parking lot at Cabo Peñas was full and the Guardia Civil shut the approach along the AS-328 approach road. For a minute and a half the “balcony of the Cantabrian Sea” went dark, but the haze left nothing to see. The evening chatter died away, leaving silence and the surf, which seemed to gather strength under the cliff. The orbayu came in — the fine, mist-like drizzle Asturians barely count as rain. Many never even took their eclipse glasses out of the package.

The half-hour that settled it

17:28, the local chat group: “Huge cloud coming in off the ocean. Wonder how far it will get?” 17:39: “Five minutes ago it was sunny in Nava, and now a cloud has drifted over from the Infiesto side.” 17:47: “Now it’s rolled in on us from the northeast. It was clear all day.” After 18:00 the cloud reached Oviedo, and fog rose behind it. People began coming down from Naranco an hour before the start, and the buses back down ran ahead of schedule.

Why the forecast failed

On the coast, Spain’s national weather service, AEMET, got it right: from August 11 it had consistently forecast clouds along the shoreline. It missed the mark inland, however — precisely where people had driven hoping to escape the coastal clouds. Oviedo was forecast to have “clouds with sunny breaks”, but instead, a solid cloud deck moved in. At 16:26, four hours before totality, the Gijón geographer and climatologist Pablo Heres was already calling for the back-up plans. In the evening he explained it more calmly: “Forecasting frontal cloud is one thing: you say it will close in at six, and at six it closes in. Summer haze is another. Temperature, wind, humidity — all of it can change completely in a very short time. For better and for worse.”

More than four thousand people went up to Cuitu Negru, at 1,850 meters, that evening: the cable car ran free of charge and opened ahead of time. María García of NaturAller, who was leading the observation, said Cuitu Negru was the best place in the region and that everyone who had come up had made the right call.

The glass hall of the Palacio de Congresos held more than a hundred people — people who might have struggled to reach an outdoor viewing site or keep eclipse glasses in place for an extended period. The eclipse was shown on a big screen while a string ensemble played live, shaping the performance around the changing light.

The mountains

At El Acebo a shout rolled down the valley and the applause broke out when the Sun vanished and the corona appeared; “Qué barbaridad” — What a sight — people said again and again with their heads tipped back, while David Payares played the accordion to the hundreds who had climbed up.

The police put Tineo at 6,200 people and 1,500 cars spread along five kilometers of mountain ridge, on a site with an official capacity of 10,000. It was one of the few sites where officials produced an actual crowd estimate: everywhere else there are only words — “thousands”, “hundreds”, “packed”. Sito Villamil had come up there with his seven-year-old granddaughter.

Down below

In Gijón about three thousand people waited for the eclipse at La Providencia and, according to the police, about two thousand on Santa Catalina hill. All they saw was two minutes of darkness.

In Llanes, on the Paseo de San Pedro, they applauded twice: when it went dark and when the light came back. A group from Logroño passed the wait playing cards: “And to think they are seeing it in La Rioja right now. What a view they must be getting over there…” Some people from Madrid resting nearby had joked before it began that “we are going to see it a bit black” — in Spanish, that things are looking bad. They called it. And dozens of locals did not wait at all: they got into their cars and drove to Castile, where the eclipse was perfectly clear. Those who stayed then spent half an hour getting off the site: the only exit funneled everyone single-file through one gate, and some climbed over the wall.

In Avilés, where the sky over the square by the Centro Niemeyer was completely overcast, the crowd simply stayed at the beer festival. “We got ‘eclipsed’ on beer,” said José Manuel Blanco, who was spending the evening there with friends and his sisters. When the light came back, Marcos Arenas laughed: “What a night — I didn’t even manage to get a sip.” At Misiego, outside Villaviciosa, a string quartet played Mozart and Schubert while two dancers performed an allegory: the Moon as death, the Sun as a young woman. Then everyone put on their glasses and looked up. “The sky kept the last part of the concert for itself,” one reporter wrote.

And in Luarca, where hundreds filled the road up to the lighthouse, a couple from Porto put it most briefly of all: “St. Peter sent us the clouds” (in Spain St. Peter is traditionally held responsible for the weather).

Friends from North Carolina, Georgia and Wisconsin had spent a year planning the trip and in the end left the shore for the open sea: from the water, they reasoned, neither mountains nor trees would come between them and the sky. They set out from Cudillero with a local guide, cruised along the cliffs, stopped at a cave and cut the engine. They never saw the sun.

What our map showed

We calculated terrain shadow from lidar data for 93 official and improvised viewing sites across the region, and after the eclipse recorded what had actually happened at each one. The Sun was visible during totality at 22 of the 93 — all of them in the mountains and in the west. Nine are confirmed by reporting from the spot, eleven by the satellite cloud mask, two by accounts from our readers. At the remaining 71, nothing was seen. It is the only site-by-site picture of the day: the authorities published no such data.

The eclipse in the expat chat

In an expat chat group in Asturias it all started a day early — with the glasses.

One member went to a pharmacy with the certification in hand and found that the glasses displayed in the window weren’t the same model being sold; to the ribbing “I think you are seriously overdoing this” he replied:

On the morning of 12 August a photograph of the clouded-over hill arrived with the caption “Naranco has been stolen”. From there, it only escalated.

By four there was still hope:

By five, hope was fading:

One thread went philosophical:

Then came the memes

The disappointment did not last long: within minutes, social media had turned the disappointment into a meme festival. One line spread across Asturias. Next to it, “Asturies ye Asturies” and “No esperaba menos”: Asturias is still Asturias, and nobody expected anything else. The event was renamed “the eclipse of the clouds”, and the verdict came in one line: “El sol salió del grupo” — the Sun has left the group chat. A reporter for La Nueva España summed it up perfectly: we were promised an eclipse the like of which Asturias had never seen — and that is exactly what it was, literally, unseen. And the most practical question of the evening: “So do we get our money back on the glasses?”

The shot of the day was taken somewhere else

While Asturias was socked in, the picture that would go around the world was being shot in Aragón. Danny León, a skateboarder from Móstoles outside Madrid, drove to Novales, near Huesca, the day before: he rehearsed the jump at sunset, ran it again in the dark, and slept in the car. When totality came he had a thirty-second window and three attempts, every one of them shot blind. It was the third try at the same idea. They had shot the trick against a sunset first — half a million views — then against the Moon; on August 12 the Sun and the Moon were finally in one frame. The photograph and the video have drawn 138 million views.

So do we get our money back?

If your eclipse glasses are on the national recall list — and seven are: Lionstar, ECP Eye Care Proffesional, Pelispan, Homanaje, Orro, Opticalia and Mó by Multiópticas — you can ask for your money back. The consumer organization OCU puts it plainly: the buyer has the right to return the goods. Spanish consumer-protection law and the three-year statutory warranty provide the legal basis; the recommended sequence is to contact the retailer first, then request the official complaint form, and finally take the case to the municipal consumer office. In practice only Multiópticas has announced refunds — on its own batch, and without a receipt. One caveat: for three of the seven brands it is not the whole model that was withdrawn but one specific batch.

Llanes town hall had been handing out that same Lionstar model at the weekly markets and canceled the giveaway the day before the eclipse, while Oviedo town hall, which had given out the very same glasses at its stand at the fair, responded by pointing to the batch number: the warning covered lot LSJE202604, and what it handed out was 202607-01. And after the eclipse nothing at all was said about refunds by the Principality’s consumer protection service, by the municipal offices in Gijón, Oviedo and Avilés, or by the Asturian Consumers’ Union. In Logroño, meanwhile, the bars of Calle Laurel spent the whole evening pouring a glass of Rioja for every undamaged pair handed in: the glasses are being collected so that they can travel on to the next eclipse. No comparable program appeared in Asturias.

The roads

The emergency plan was activated at 07:59 and was lifted at 9:34 p.m., two hours earlier than planned, “with no significant incidents”. The longest tailback of the day came before the eclipse: at 11:30 a car caught fire in the Pando tunnel and a three-kilometer traffic jam lasted more than two hours. The influx of visitors forced authorities to close the access roads to Cabo Peñas, the Angliru and several other heights. The Principality’s forest service closed the forest tracks in Teverga and Peñamellera Alta.

A hundred cars, not a single ticket

At about 8:30 p.m. nearly a hundred drivers stopped on the AP-66 toll highway at kilometer 76 — not on the hard shoulder but in the climbing lane itself, effectively reducing the highway to fewer usable lanes; some carried chairs out of their cars. The traffic service cameras filmed it. Not a single ticket was issued. And across the whole of Spain enforcement was remarkably limited: one report in the Balearics, ten in Catalonia for driving into protected areas, one for a drone in Cantabria. The fine for stopping on an open road is 200 euros, half that if paid within 20 days.

The eyes

On August 12, 64 people in Asturias sought care for eye complaints, and 18 of them were given diagnoses that may be connected with watching the eclipse. By the evening of August 13 the country had logged more than 530 visits: Europa Press, the Spanish news agency, collected the tallies from every region except the Canary Islands. Catalonia had the most, 134, of whom 40 went on to an ophthalmologist; Madrid, which was not even in the path of totality, had 101; the Basque Country 58, Andalusia 44, Murcia 32, Aragón about thirty, Galicia 19, Asturias those same 18, Castile and León 10. No region reported a severe injury or a single hospitalization. The Asturian health service is not worried by its 64: that many people walk into a health center with an eye complaint on any given evening. Oihana Ormazabal, head of emergency medicine at the Donostia hospital in San Sebastián, warned that the symptoms of solar retinopathy can show up any time within thirty days: watch for a spot in the center of your field of vision, for straight lines that suddenly go wavy, and for flashes. There may be no pain at all. The Asturian protocol is to go first to your own health center — the neighborhood primary-care clinic — and not to the emergency room: there they measure visual acuity and decide whether an urgent referral to an ophthalmologist is needed. Urgent means vision has dropped noticeably, the spot in the center has appeared in both eyes, or the pain will not let up. And the count can still rise: retinal damage takes a day or two to declare itself, sometimes longer.

The money

The most expensive accommodation was exactly where nothing could be seen: listings in Cudillero were up at 5,000 euros a night, and a hostel in inland Asturias raised the price of a bed in a shared room from 36 to 160 euros. Asturias saw the largest increase in bookings anywhere in Spain: up 76% on last year, with the average price 85% higher.

A hundred and twenty-one years ago

Asturias watched the previous total eclipse in 1905, and a columnist for the newspaper El Carbayón climbed that same Naranco to see it. The learned gentlemen with their instruments, he wrote, looked like pygmies from below: “oh, the nothingness and vanity of human greatness”.

What comes next

Another total eclipse comes on August 2, 2027, but in the morning and with the path crossing the Strait of Gibraltar: in Ceuta totality will last 4 minutes 48 seconds. An annular eclipse follows on January 26, 2028. After that there will be no total solar eclipse in Spain until 2053, and none in Asturias until 2180. Near the exit of the Centro Niemeyer in Avilés on August 12, plans were already being made: “Nos vemos en Cádiz — see you in Cádiz, we’ll definitely see it there.”

Cádiz has already gone up

“See you in Cádiz” had a price on it within a day. In Tarifa, the southern tip of the Spanish mainland, nothing is left on Booking.com for August 2, 2027: one guesthouse sold every room it had for the night before, August 1, at 245 euros, paid up front and nonrefundable, and only three apartments are left, at 2,500 to 10,000 euros a night. A four-star hotel in the city of Cádiz has sold out both nights at 824 euros, four times what it charges in an ordinary August. A three-bedroom house in Conil de la Frontera is listed at 29,816 euros. Asturias looked exactly like this in the days before August 12, with one difference: in Cudillero, 5,000 euros a night bought a view of nothing.