One of the odder items on a Gibraltar government meeting agenda last year was the street lighting. Officials wanted to be certain the lamps along Main Street and Devils Tower Road would not switch themselves on automatically in the middle of a Monday morning. They have good reason to worry. At 10:46 on 2 August 2027 the Moon will cover the Sun completely over the Rock, the light sensors will conclude that night has fallen, and for four and a half minutes they will be right. This is the big one. Gibraltar sits inside the path of totality for the longest total solar eclipse that falls on easily reachable land anywhere this century. The Rock gets **4 minutes 28 seconds** of it. Cadiz gets 2 minutes 54. Malaga city gets under two minutes. Seville, which half of Europe seems to assume is the place to go, gets no totality at all. The last time the Moon's shadow fell on Gibraltar was **22 December 1870**. Nobody now living has seen this happen here, and nobody now living will see it happen here again. [[WIDGET:EclipseCountdown]] The Moon takes its first bite out of the Sun at about 09:41, when the Sun is 25 degrees above the eastern horizon. For the next hour almost nothing seems to happen, because human eyes correct for a slow dimming remarkably well. In the last ten minutes the light turns metallic and wrong, shadows sharpen to knife edges, the temperature drops, and the swifts over Casemates go quiet. Then at 10:46 the last bead of sunlight vanishes and the corona appears. The Sun is 38.7 degrees up, on a bearing of 96 degrees, which is due east and a shade south. Totality holds for 4 minutes 28 seconds in the centre of town. At 10:50 the diamond ring flares on the other side and it is over. The partial phases drag on until 12:01, by which time most people have gone back to work. > It's going to be massive. This is not National Day. That is William Recagno, president of the Gibraltar Astronomical Society, quoted in the Gibraltar Chronicle after the Minister for the Environment, Dr John Cortes, chaired a coordination meeting on the eclipse with the police, transport and public health. When a territory that throws Gibraltar's National Day starts telling people this will be bigger, it is worth listening. The centre line of the eclipse runs about 45 kilometres south of Gibraltar, out over the Strait and across northern Morocco. The closer you are to that line, the longer the Moon's shadow sits on top of you. Here is how the region ranks. | Where | Totality | Notes | | Luxor, Egypt | 6m 22s | The global maximum, and a desert sky | | Tangier, Morocco | 4m 51s | Across the water, one hour behind on the clock | | Ceuta | 4m 48s | The longest anywhere in Spanish territory | | Tarifa | 4m 38s | The longest on mainland Spain | | **Gibraltar** | **4m 28s** | 4m 33s if you stand at Europa Point | | Algeciras | 4m 26s | Across the bay | | Marbella | 3m 16s | | | Cadiz | 2m 54s | | | Malaga city | 1m 49s | Close to the northern limit, so it varies by street | | Almeria city | None | Misses totality by a hair, magnitude 0.9995 | | Seville | None | A deep partial only, magnitude 0.979 | Spanish figures there are the official ones published by Spain's Instituto Geografico Nacional, which computes a fixed reference point for every municipality. Almeria is the cruellest entry on the list. The city misses totality by a fraction of a per cent, while Roquetas de Mar, twenty kilometres down the road, gets a minute and a half of it. There is no such thing as nearly total. You are either in the shadow or you are not, and the difference is the difference between a dimmed afternoon and the most extraordinary thing most people ever see. Here is something no other guide will tell you, because it takes a calculation rather than a copied table. Gibraltar is only about five kilometres from the frontier to Europa Point, but that five kilometres is five kilometres closer to the centre line. Totality is measurably longer at the southern tip than at the northern end. | Where you stand | Totality | | La Linea, over the frontier | 4m 25.5s | | The frontier and northern tip | 4m 26.9s | | The airport runway | 4m 27.5s | | Ocean Village | 4m 28.0s | | Main Street and Casemates | 4m 28.2s | | Catalan Bay | 4m 29.3s | | Sandy Bay | 4m 30.6s | | O'Hara's Battery, the summit | 4m 31.4s | | Europa Point | 4m 32.6s | Europa Point beats the frontier by 5.7 seconds, and beats Casemates Square by 4.4 seconds. That is roughly one extra second of totality for every kilometre you walk south. Climbing does nothing for you, incidentally. Standing on the 426 metre summit costs you a fourteenth of a second against sea level on the same latitude, so height is worth having for the view and for nothing else. O'Hara's Battery, at the top, is in any case closed for refurbishment. People who do this seriously already think this way. Paul Maley of the NASA Johnson Space Center Astronomical Society, who has been advising on the Gibraltar planning, has pointed out that Tarifa