Tripoli, Sabratha, Leptis Magna, Cyrenaica,
Benghazi, Pentapolis, Byzantine mosaics,
and the Total Solar Eclipse (6min+)
From 3760 EUR per person
On 2nd August 2027, the Moon’s shadow will cross North Africa, and the sun will disappear for more than six minutes. Benghazi sits almost exactly on the centreline, under some of the most reliably cloudless skies anywhere on the path.
This 9-day program is built around that morning and around the ancient Roman and Greek world that surrounds it.
The total solar eclipse of 2nd August 2027 has been nicknamed the Eclipse of the Century. Its maximum duration of 6 minutes and 23 seconds makes it the longest total solar eclipse visible from easily accessible land in the entire 21st century, and the longest anywhere until 2114.
The path of totality sweeps from the Atlantic across southern Spain, Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia before crossing northeastern Libya and continuing on to Luxor. Most of North Africa’s great cities miss out entirely. Tripoli is sliced by the southern edge of the path, Algiers, Tunis and Cairo see only a deep partial eclipse. Benghazi sits directly on the centreline, with roughly six minutes of totality and a near-zero probability of cloud.
There is arguably no better place on earth to stand that morning.
And unlike the crowds converging on Andalusia and Luxor, you will be watching it from a country that almost no one visits.
Our journey begins in the west, in the region the Romans knew as Tripolitania. The land of the three cities, Sabratha, Oea and Leptis Magna, from which Tripoli still takes its name.
If eastern Libya is the Greek story, the west is the Roman one.
It opens on the coast at Sabratha, whose three-storey theatre rises straight out of the shore, and continues in Tripoli itself. Ancient Oea, the only one of the three cities still living, its Arch of Marcus Aurelius wrapped in an old town of Ottoman mosques, covered souqs and Italian colonial streets.
The finest is saved for last in western Libya - Leptis Magna, home city of the emperor Septimius Severus and one of the most complete Roman cities on earth.
We then take a short flight east that carries the group across the whole width of the country to Benghazi and the eclipse.
Only recently opened to tourism, eastern Libya offers a journey through Cyrenaica. If western Libya is the Roman story, eastern Libya is the Greek one.
Our trip begins in Benghazi, Libya’s second city and a Mediterranean port with a long and layered history, where we visit the shrine of Omar al-Mukhtar, the seafront lighthouse, and the coastal quarters of the city, with a full preparation day and eclipse briefing before the main event.
After the eclipse, the program moves through the Jebel Akhdar, the Green Mountain, an upland of forest and cliffs quite unlike the desert Libya of the popular imagination.
Here we find Cyrene, one of the most important cities of the classical world and a UNESCO World Heritage Site, its Temple of Zeus, larger than the Parthenon. Its port at Apollonia, where a Greek theatre sits at the water’s edge and half the ancient harbour lies submerged offshore. The extraordinary Byzantine mosaics of Qasr Libya. And the headland of Ras al-Hilal, where limestone cliffs drop into turquoise water.
The final full day follows the coast road through two more cities of the ancient Pentapolis - Tocra and Ptolemais - before ending in Shahat, the modern town beside Cyrene.
At almost every one of these sites, you will have the place to yourself.
Timings on eclipse day are dictated by the eclipse itself. Totality over the Benghazi area falls late in the morning, and the group will be in position well before first contact. The final viewing site will be confirmed closer to the date on the basis of local conditions and access, and the order of days 4 and 5 may be adjusted to suit.
Never look at the partially eclipsed sun without certified ISO 12312-2 eclipse glasses.
This is a combined western-and-eastern Libya itinerary, beginning in Tripoli and ending in the Green Mountain. Tripoli's old town, souqs and mosques close on Fridays and Saturdays, so the western days are arranged to tour the city itself on a weekday; Sabratha and Leptis Magna lie outside the city and are unaffected.
The weather in Libya during the summer and August will be very hot. If you do not cope well with heat this trip may not be suitable for you.
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