By Max Milano (Travel Writer & Photographer) The moment I heard that Spain’s 2026 total solar eclipse would enter the Iberian Peninsula over A Coruña, one thought came to mind. The eclipse would occur in the early evening, about an hour before sunset. That created a rare opportunity to place something remarkable in the foreground. And what could be better than a 2,000-year-old Roman lighthouse, the Tower of Hercules, standing guard over the entrance to […]

By Max Milano (Travel Writer and Photographer) I consider myself something of an old hand when it comes to total solar eclipses. The upcoming total eclipse in Spain will be my third. That is nothing to boast about, since solar eclipses are not especially rare on a planetary scale. Somewhere on Earth, between two and five solar eclipses occur every year, although many are only partial. A total solar eclipse happens somewhere on our planet […]

By Max Milano (Travel Writer) Madrid. Not a particularly pretty city, Hemingway wrote in Death in the Afternoon. It’s sometimes as if its grandiose buildings could be anywhere, Buenos Aires, for example. But it’s when one sees that deep blue, high-desert winter sky and the snow dusting the jagged peaks of the Sierra de Guadarrama as they loom above the city that one realizes it can’t be anywhere else but Madrid. But things have changed […]

By Max Milano (Travel Writer & Photographer) The day begins with dust, dry air, and a sun sharp as glass, even this early. Aragon opens on the road before us. We’re in high desert country. Red and ancient. Carved by history and silence. Orwell called it beautiful in the snow, even with machine guns on the hills. Today, it’s just hot. Aragon is an arid, high inland desert that extends from the snow-capped Pyrenees Mountains […]