Europe 26 – Segovia and the Eclipse

Wednesday, 12 August 2026

Since the eclipse wasn’t scheduled to happen until late evening, I contemplated what to do with the rest of my day. I decided that Segovia would be cool and might even be a cool spot to catch the eclipse. So I booked train tickets out.

Unfortunately the train doesn’t get you actually into the town, but requires waiting for one of the 2 buses that heads in. And the one that I happened to get on wasn’t the one that went directly to the Aqueduct. But it was fine…just started my walking day a bit early haha.

This is such a cool thing. Although I guess you can’t actually look right down the water channel like I thought I remembered doing before. I walked all the way around trying to find the back way in hehe. Oh well! Still super neat. On my way around I found people posing with this little devil statue and I don’t know the significance but he’s pretty fun 🙂

Wandered through town…

Found the Cathedral with some incredibly beautiful flowers out front.

Some pretty stunning stained glass

Huge Gothic beast! Incredible!

Love the cupola ceiling in this chapel

They have a basement full of paintings. I liked these two the most. The first because of the fun style…kind of Rubens mixed with anime hehe. And that it’s Joseph’s dream which I don’t think I have ever seen depicted. His part in the story seems to get glossed over. And I like the second because of the tenderness…it’s sweet 🙂

In one of the chapels there was a pair of awesome dragons holding the light fixtures!

Next I climbed around on the old city wall at one of the medieval gates.

Made it to the Alcazar! There were so many people there, probably to view the eclipse. The line to get tickets was SO LONG! I ate my lunch in the line and entertained myself with this awesome old tile map of Spain.

Started the tour in the cellars at the original foundation of the place. Pretty neat

Such a beautiful place!

No wonder it was never sieged…look at that cliff!

This building held the original science laboratory. The chemist Proust, who came up with the law of definite proportions, taught here at the Royal Artillery School.

When I saw this poster about the eclipse, I realized that the website I had consulted before buying train tickets gave me the wrong times and I would be at Chamartin (outside of the totality zone) at eclipse time. All the later trains out were already booked full so I scrapped my plan to view in Segovia, took the bus back to the train station, got a tortilla bocadillo and some fresh squeezed orange juice, and got an earlier train back to Madrid (and they just switched it over and didn’t charge me anything more!) 🙂

Love going 223 km/hr and getting there in just 27 minutes!

On Tuesday evening, I started talking to some nice people on the Metro about the eclipse. They are from Philly but have been living in Barcelona and came to Alcobendas for the eclipse. They weren’t sure where to view from, but maybe just from the roof of their hotel. I offered some glasses to them since they didn’t have any (I brought extras for just such an eventuality). I left them at the front desk since I was planning to view from Segovia. But when I ended up back at my hotel and they hadn’t come get them yet, I just went with them to their hotel and watched from there. It was so amazing! That’s Alex Rodriguez taking the photo, their partner Carolyne in the hat, and their friend Tina who was visiting.