Where to Watch the 2027 Total Solar Eclipse

• Clearest skies: the Nile valley in Egypt. All 17 Egyptian towns on this page were clear at eclipse time in at least 90% of early-August days from 2005 to 2024, Minya highest at 99%. The sun stands 79° to 83° up, nearly overhead.
• Longest totality: Girga, 6m 27s, with 97% clear-sky odds. 11 of the 17 Egyptian towns get six minutes or more; Luxor has 6m 26s.
• Close behind: Tunisia and Libya, 89% to 97% clear, with the sun 54° to 69° high and totality up to 6m 13s.
• Europe: southern Spain and Gibraltar, 74% to 84% clear. Totality up to 4m 41s, with the sun 37° to 41° high, low enough to frame it over a landscape. Melilla, the Spanish city on the Moroccan coast, has 61%.
• Highest cloud risk: the highlands of Yemen and Saudi Arabia. 13 towns there, all above 1,000 m, were clear on fewer than 20% of those days.
• Terrain is rarely the problem in 2027. At every town centre here the sun clears the measured skyline by at least 17.2°. The tightest are Gibraltar, where the Rock rises 21.2° in the sun's direction, and Chefchaouen, under the Rif (20.5°).

Heliora wrote this page. Clear-sky odds are history, not a forecast: a town at 97% can still be clouded out on the day.

• Clear sky: the share of days from 30 July to 5 August, 2005 to 2024, when cloud cover was 20% or less in the hour of the eclipse (140 samples per town, ERA5 reanalysis via Open-Meteo).
• Totality and its local start time, at the town's coordinate. Rows marked near edge have under two minutes: the town sits near the edge of the path, and totality grows quickly toward the centre line.
• Sun height above a flat horizon at the moment of maximum eclipse, and how far it stands above the skyline measured from a 360° terrain ray-cast out to 30 km. Above skyline can exceed sun height where the skyline sits below a flat horizon, as over the sea or a plain seen from higher ground.

Each town name opens its full 2027 page with every contact time. Preview in 3D plays the eclipse in Heliora's sky view from that spot, against the real skyline. Within a country, towns are ranked by clear-sky odds, then totality length, sun height and skyline clearance; countries are ordered by their median clear-sky odds.

Several countries on the path are under travel warnings. The UK government, for one, advises against all travel to Yemen and to most of Somalia, and against all travel to Libya outside a few cities, where it advises against all but essential travel (UK foreign travel advice, read 2026-10-18). Check your own government's advice for each place.

In Egypt and Arabia totality falls between noon and 14:00 local time in early August: plan shade and water. A town with excellent odds can still be the wrong choice if you cannot get there or stay there safely.

Where is the best place to watch the 2027 total solar eclipse?

On clear-sky history, the Nile valley in Egypt: All 17 Egyptian towns on this page were clear at eclipse time in at least 90% of the early-August days from 2005 to 2024. The longest totality on this page is Girga at 6m 27s, with 97%; Luxor has 6m 26s and 94%. Tunisia and Libya are close behind on odds (89% to 97%), with the sun lower. In Europe, the best odds are in Marbella, Spain, at 84%, with 3m 17s of totality and the sun 38.9° high.

Where is the 2027 eclipse most likely to be clouded out?

In the highlands of Yemen and Saudi Arabia. 13 towns on this page, all more than 1,000 m up, were clear at eclipse time on fewer than 20% of the early-August days from 2005 to 2024, including Sayyān (0%) and Khamis Mushait (3%). Along the Strait of Gibraltar the odds are middling: Tangier 60%, Gibraltar 74%.

Can mountains block the 2027 eclipse?

Not at any town centre on this page. At the moment of maximum the sun stands at least 17.2° above the measured skyline in its direction everywhere here. The two tightest margins are Gibraltar (17.2°) and Chefchaouen (18.0°), where high ground rises about 20° in the sun's direction. A spot right under a steep slope or a building can still lose the sun, so check the exact place you will stand.

• Towns: the 104 places inside the path of totality that have an indexed Heliora 2027 page (towns of 100,000 people or more, the ten largest per country on the path, plus Tarifa and Chefchaouen), at their GeoNames coordinates (CC BY 4.0).
• Clear-sky odds: hourly cloud cover from the Open-Meteo historical weather API, ERA5 model with ECMWF IFS as fallback. ERA5 is the Copernicus Climate Change Service reanalysis (Hersbach et al., ERA5 hourly data on single levels). A reanalysis grid cell is about 30 km across, so a coastal town's figure blends sea and land.
• Cross-check: Eclipsophile's 2027 climatology, built from satellite cloud records, describes the same pattern in more depth: "Over Libya and Egypt, cloud is almost unknown in the summer months", "the Mediterranean coast of Morocco is a dicey place to wait for an eclipse", and on the Arabian Peninsula "dust and cloud will both be ongoing concerns". Read it for dust and marine stratus, which a cloud-cover percentage does not capture.
• Eclipse times: Astronomy Engine with a ΔT correction. Its totality durations run a few seconds longer than published canonical values, so treat the 6m 26s shown for Luxor as a few seconds generous, as the 2026 vs 2027 page explains.
• Terrain: AWS terrain tiles at zoom 10 (cells of about 120 to 150 m at these latitudes), 360 rays to 30 km from 1.7 m above the ground at the town coordinate. Buildings and trees are not included. Accuracy limits are on the method page.

Computed 2026-10-18. Outside sources read the same day. Found an error? Tell us.