Due Diligence: A Cautionary Tale of Astronomical Planning and Geographical Oversight

I like to think of myself as a decent planner, and when I spend money I like to make sure I’m getting value. Both qualities were very much on display last August when I booked a trip to Valencia, Spain, to witness a total solar eclipse.

The planning had started years earlier. Solar eclipses are predictable to the minute centuries in advance, and I’d known about the Spanish eclipse long before it was on anyone else’s radar. When flight schedules dropped in August 2025, I was ready, with flights booked within days and a decent hotel by the beach secured shortly after.

A full year out, everything was sorted…Or so I thought.

It was only this weekend, while idly tracing the eclipse path on a map, that the horrible truth revealed itself. The eclipse occurs just before sunset on August 12th, with totality at around 20:32 local time. At that moment, the sun will sit at an azimuth of approximately 280 degrees, almost due west, and a mere four degrees above the horizon.

Four degrees. Barely above the rooftops. My beach faces east. Between me and that critical western horizon sits the entire city of Valencia.

A year of planning, undone by the most basic of oversights: I never once checked which way the hotel was facing.

My first instinct was damage limitation. Every rooftop bar and viewing lounge worth its salt had pivoted to a ticketed eclipse experience, and every last one had sold out long ago. The prime western waterfronts? Gone. The clever spots the locals had quietly earmarked? Gone. The city had done its due diligence rather better than I had.

So I scrambled for whatever was left: a ticketed event on salt marshes twenty miles outside the city. Clear western horizon, unobstructed views, and absolutely nothing else to recommend it.

The tickets are $500 each.I have myself, my wife, and two adult children. Two thousand dollars. For a two-hour excursion to a salt marsh. All because I spent years planning the astronomy and approximately zero minutes thinking about hotel orientation. The hotel, incidentally, cost not much more than those tickets.

The real sting, however, is that you can’t easily flee. When a solar eclipse strikes a major European city at the absolute peak of the August holiday season, the roads will inevitably paralyse. Local authorities are already whispering the word gridlock. Hiring a car to escape the urban rooflines is a gamble that likely ends in a multi-lane parking lot on the edge of town. Lack of due diligence is constricting my options.

Optimise one variable obsessively, overlook another entirely, and the savings you worked so hard to capture end up funding someone else’s overpriced catering.

I haven’t pulled the trigger on the tickets yet. I’m still looking for alternatives, but the clock is ticking loudly. And in my experience, when you’re scrambling at the last minute to fix a position you got wrong, you rarely get a good price.