Eclipse in Spain-illustrated
Improvising on the ground after planning for a year.
We were in Spain for the total eclipse, a trip planned well in advance, as one can do with eclipse travel, since we know, as far forward as you care to look, exactly where and when you have to be. We’ve embraced the concept, this will be our fifth together.
We’d decided on Leon, in the north of Spain, based on accessibility and the chance of clouds, as Seeing It is the only thing that really matters. Thence, since we’re in Europe, to Edinburgh where our Molly was in a play, part of the Fringe festival. Two distinct trips — two missions and climates — divided by a Ryanair flight.
Madrid was hot. We did the Prado and the Thyssen. The Prado was too big and hot. The Thyssen was just right, a well curated selection, and they let you take pictures. I had one good steak. We decided we just don’t like food in Spain (not to say Spanish food), rashly concluded from this and our one other trip 25 years ago. We started looking for Asian food. It was 100 degrees out.
[I get tired of all the huge religious pictures. The same things over and over 15 feet off the ground. Get me off this floor, get me back to modern art. In the context of a private collection, these pictures no longer read as acts of devotion, but signs of wealth — who had the money to commission and collect the most affecting paintings. Rich art collecting, then as now, is a sign of conspicuous vanity. Also, it’s hard to conceive the power of pictures before photography. You can see in this collection, too, the instant photography changed visual art: Abstraction, painting what couldn’t be photographed.]
Madrid to Leon, we head north into the path of totality. You notice on the metro to the train station, and definitely on the train to Leon, the increasing density: the gathering of the nerds, astronomy geeks and photographers for sure; couples with matching Osprey backpacks and startling mispronunciations, all on their way to the same place.
This I planned a year in advance — the Airbnb, the car rental, then the trains and planes. A car for mobility on the day of is the linchpin, so when our train pulled into Leon we hustled to the rental office. All went smooth, and we even learned of an eclipse site chatting with an elderly British couple. We wrote down the name: Valdevimbre.
We don’t need the car till tomorrow and didn’t want to drive into the crowded old centro, so we pocketed the keys and left it in the parking lot, dragging our bags through the new town to the old town and our Airbnb near the Cathedral.
Leon is a beautiful small city with a large old town with huge carless areas that make the city thrive. Restaurants and bars and playgrounds spill into the street. We snuck into the cathedral through the bookshop because we could, because we’re cheap. We stood on the walls to watch the sun go down: This time tomorrow.
Eclipse day, looking for eggs in Leon, no one is in a hurry to get going though this is the most comfortable time of day. We left stuff in our room and walked with just backpacks back to the station. A nice walk when you’re not pulling plastic over stone. The Eclipse–the thing itself–doesn’t start till 730pm So we have a long day to find our perfect spot. I had pages of notes of possible places copy-and-pasted over the past year: but it’s always a game-day decision. We knew we’d go south into the cloudless plains rather than north into the mountains; we started with a route map of three villages.
Before grabbing the car, we went to the Palace of Exhibitions where the European Space Agency had set up shop: they also liked Leon. Around a corner and through a park from the train station, there were a hundred nerds gathered when they opened their doors at 10am, including us.
They had sciencey exhibits and free viewing glasses — but no t-shirts! which tbh was what I was there for. The staff had the cool shirts but not for sale. We stalked that open cardboard box stashed somewhere but found nothing. Out in the huge parking lot, where everything would move at 5pm, there’s a stage for the public viewing of the total eclipse over the asphalt and distant suburbs.
A free public observation in the city of León in collaboration with the University of León. It will offer engaging talks about solar science and space missions from ESA experts, educational activities, and ESA’s live broadcast. The programme will be conducted in Spanish. Worse case scenario we end up back here — but, no way.
As we head to the car, I’m still fixated on t-shirts: where are the entrepreneurs? In Burlington the commemorative t-shirt scalpers were everywhere. We got safety sandwiches and yogurt from the train station cafe, and drove out of Leon.
The first place on our village tour was Valdevimbre, which we heard about eavesdropping. Apparently a wine gathering coincides with the eclipse. That we saw no sign of. We took a walk around town and it was desolate and also in a valley. They had famous caves, clawed out of clay since Roman times, used for homes and wine storage, now restaurants and a museum. We took a quick walk on top of the caves which were all locked, and moved on.
We’re now on lovely narrow village roads with sparse farms and fields of greens, vines and sunflowers. There’d been rumors of traffic and roads closed, but it’s quiet out here.
The forecast has been terrific for days, clear as a ding-dong bell, it looks 100% we’ll see it, which is the main thing, which is everything. In 2024, because of the cloudy forecast three days out, we cancelled our year-old Dallas plans–airbb, car, flight–and drove to Vermont.
Village 2, Valencia de Don Juan, has a castle with the same name. Sliding into town we managed the last parking spot at the town park: which Julie took as a sign. I’m almost convinced. I have one more town on my list, a medieval ruin at Cea, but this looks good.
There was a colorous merry-go-round with every licensing violation you can imagine, Snow White hard by Spongebob, Smurfs and Mario. Parks and walks surrounding the castle, shady with big trees, fountains and a dock pond. The ticket office is there too. In broken Spanish I got the last tickets for the last tour of the Castle. 2 Euro and I could have gotten mine for 1€ if I’d disclosed my age. The tour is now, so I run to find Julie in the park, come on, we’re going inside.
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The guide asked how’s our Spanish and we said OK which was a mistake. The tour, in Spanish, was apparently interesting and funny and we only understood every 6th word.
After the tour I grabbed the guy and confirmed that this castle courtyard, with its view west over river and plains, would be open for the event. Tickets were again 2 Euros. They were selling 2000 of them. On sale at 6pm, and despite no sign of predicted crowds, I was going to be near the front. Committed. After a year plus, we had a plan, a place, and a lot of time to kill.
After lounging horizontally in the park, we found a street cafe with a diario menu, 14€ for 3 courses plus coffee and dessert. Salad and veal and potatoes and pasta and more food than we could eat but a good place for shade and people watching. The temps there are 90–95. The only other place we hung out was the supermarket which had air-conditioning. It surprised us how little AC there was in town.
More interesting to me: how many people, even and especially in the service industries, didn’t speak English. Waiter waitress guy in the ticket office. Recent travel in nearby Italy and Portugal — where everyone spoke the lingua franca, so to speak — led us to expect English. We liked it: It made things feel foreign, more like the olden days, less EU-homogenized — as they should when you fly 7 hours over an ocean.
We started wandering, checking out hotels for any sign of a pool. Then Julie noticed on the map a complex of pools down the hill and across the valley, a 20-minute walk according to the google, and open now. So after our long lunch and some misdirection on the old streets, we backtracked to the castle and down the hill to cross the bridge. It’s walking distance, but it’s the heat of the day and we’re taking it easy. Our extra stuff, the food and backup camera, is in the car. Thanks to our great parking spot.
Sprawling lots and hundreds of cars down there, a huge municipal pool complex. And it stays open till 9:30 so one could have theoretically seen the eclipse from there. We just wanted to get in the water. We paid 5E to go in, there were wave pools and a waterpark with slides and hundreds of kids and many adults. Then we noticed everyone was wearing bathing caps…which they sold at the ice cream stand for 3E a piece. When in Spain. Always a good look.
Seven pools and a restaurant. We head to the Olympic-sized pool. We swam in underwear not identifiable as such. We sat on grass and napped on benches inside a little covered area called the Bibliopiscina, the swimming pool library, where later they set up ping pong and reading programs for kids. A lovely rest but it was getting on to 5pm, time to head back up the hill.
Here we think about the difference from where we live — this amazing complex, cheap, well maintained, for the residents of the area. Oh, America. This is why we can’t have nice things.
Back up to the town park, cooled my feet in the kiddie fountain. Our third time in the AC’d supermarket we finally buy some stuff for a picnic. Two sandwiches, a liter of gazpacho soup, a large sparkling water, and a can of Pringles. A miracle of the trip was that all of this somehow came to only 8 Euro.
6pm we’re near the front of the line to buy our 2E tix, for the eclipse at the castle. They started selling early. The castle won’t officially open till 7:30, so we caught the initial bite, the mordida of the totality, outside the castle. Most of the serious shooters had long set up their scopes and camera rigs here. A pack of tourists too, in a shady area under trees with a good view west, the merry-go-round and taqueria truck in the parking lot now blasting Spanish pop. People know the words.
And finally. All the kids with their mylar glasses finally see it, and line up and gasp. Right on schedule, the perfectly round disk of the invisible full moon sliding over the perfectly round disk of the sun. It will take about 35 minutes to completely cover the sun: to reach totality. Once it got proper going we headed to the castle, Valencia de Don Juan.
As we walk around, there is a sudden rustle and shout in the bright light and shadow of the plain outside the high walls. A father is chasing and screaming at his young son, for throwing his phone, I gathered. Now he’s got the kid and is slapping him and Julie, instantly and instinctively, in full voice yells, “Hey! What the fuck! Leave him alone!” I, recognising the language barrier, just add in a universal “Hey!” as loud as it can carry. I don’t know if our tourist voices in English were the only ones but they may have been. Dad grabs the kid and brings him quietly back to Mom, as our barrage trails off. I am proud of Julie, sad for the kid, and we are still vibed when we cross the moat.
There were maybe 200–300 people inside. A tour group had staked out the nicest spot but there’s plenty of room along a long fence. There was a PA playing what you’re expect: Star Wars theme, Bolero. The castle walls a dramatic backdrop, the view to the west, endless, cloudless: the only thing that matters.
There is the ineffable light that comes before, the sun is smaller and “stopped down,” the light is sharper. I took pics of the local weeds with the partial pinpoint sun breaking through. Which I could do because this was a low, almost sunset eclipse. I had a second camera, actually a phone, trained on the crowd to record the reaction. I first did this in Vermont in 2024. It has become almost as interesting to me as the sky: the visceral response of people to the experience of anomaly and beauty.
This was a relatively short eclipse, only 100 seconds, so I spent most of it futzing with my camera. Only hand-held for me, trying to get it to focus while holding a piece of mylar in front of the lens. The perennial downside of being a photographer: after all I don’t really experience it fully just to get photos that are identical to everyone else’s.
You are seeing something impossible, unimaginable. You can’t know what that’s like until you are there. Direct experience of the scale of the universe, the solar system, in real time. The curtain pulled back. A glimpse of how things work on a macro level. You feel it and everyone reacts. All I can say is it’s impossibly strange and beautiful, and strangeness and beauty are somehow intertwined, and what other reason is there to travel? And Spain into the bargain.
Next year, Tunisia. Perhaps a tripod.
The partial eclipse, before totality, everyone pays close attention to. From the first bite to the diamond ring that appears in the seconds before. But the second partiality, the continuing partial eclipse after the big event — the moon still sliding off the sun — hardly anyone pays attention. This magical thing we all travelled for is still happening. We stayed at the castle, then went back to the park. The sun was low towards sunset over the hills, the bite was still there, and soon I could take direct photos. A rare and beautiful moment: all eclipses I’ve seen are high in the bright sky. I took too many pics of the orange sun and purple sunset, while most people had packed up and emptied out.
No traffic, no madness, nothing, after the eclipse. A quick ride on freeways. We returned the car to the train station and walked back into the jumping old town of midnight Leon. Next day train back to a hotter Madrid, a rooftop pool, and the Banksy Museum. And on to Scotland.
