Fire risk has moved Portugal's main eclipse viewing site to an airfield outside Bragança
The official Wednesday programme has been pulled out of Rio de Onor and Guadramil and rehoused at Bragança Municipal Aerodrome, where the Sun will be 99% covered.
If your Wednesday plan involved Rio de Onor, redraw it. Bragança town council has pulled every official eclipse viewing activity out of the villages of Rio de Onor and Guadramil, inside the Montesinho Natural Park, and moved them to Bragança Municipal Aerodrome.
The reason is not astronomical. It is fire. Authorities restricted access to the park’s forested areas given the danger rating, a decision weighted by the Deilão rural fire that broke out on 27 July in an isolated stretch of Montesinho close to the planned viewing spot. Packing thousands of people into woodland at maximum fire danger, with civil protection crews tied up managing crowds instead of standing ready, was asking for trouble.
What you lose, and what you gain
You lose totality. On the Portuguese mainland, the path of totality is confined to the N308 road between Rio de Onor and Guadramil, and it lasts 25.6 seconds, beginning at 19:30:17 local time. At the aerodrome the Sun will be 99% covered.
You gain nearly everything else. The scientific, educational, cultural and exhibition programme built for Rio de Onor moves across intact. And one detail matters more than that final one per cent: at sunset the Sun will sit very low in the west, somewhere between about 3 and 12 degrees above the horizon. You need a completely unobstructed western horizon, and a runway is precisely that. A village tucked into a valley is not.
Times and percentages
The eclipse begins at 18:33, peaks at 19:30 and ends at 20:23. On the mainland, coverage ranges from 99.9% in Bragança down to 92.8% in Faro. Madeira reaches 77.6%, and the Azores fall between 72.5% and 77.6%.
Anyone staying near Lisbon has a new option. Parques de Sintra has announced that the forecourt of the Cabo da Roca lighthouse will open to the public on Wednesday, after tickets for the Pena Palace sold out.
We have written before on where to watch the eclipse in Portugal and the timings by region and on choosing glasses that will not damage your eyes. That last one is where there is no room to improvise: never look at the Sun without a certified filter, not even at 99%. The technical detail is published by the Porto Planetarium.
Photo: El alistano / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)
