José Antonio Vera, a columnist for World Stock Market, published an opinion piece titled "Eclipsados por el eclipse" (Eclipsed by the eclipse) on August 11, 2026, accusing Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez of using this week's solar eclipse to draw attention away from what Vera described as chaos in Ceuta, the Spanish enclave in North Africa.
Vera wrote that Sánchez, who has recently recommended songs and books that the columnist said he has no plan to listen to or read, has now announced he will leave his summer residence at La Mareta, a 1,900-square-meter house on a 40,000-square-meter plot in the Canary Islands, for a few hours to watch the August 12 eclipse from the Yebes Astronomical Observatory in Guadalajara. Vera said Sánchez had called the eclipse the event of the century, and wrote that the prime minister planned to explain the phenomenon from aboard the government's Falcon jet in a broadcast on TikTok.
Claims about Ceuta
Vera also criticized Interior Minister Fernando Grande-Marlaska, writing that residents of Ceuta are now afraid to sit even on their own terraces, citing an incident he said happened to a local resident named Beatriz, who woke up to find a 20-year-old man lying in her bed. Vera wrote that around ten thousand people from North Africa remain in the city's parks and beaches, a situation he said Marlaska describes as normality. He contrasted this with Marlaska's own neighborhood, the exclusive El Escorial, near Madrid, which Vera described as calm by comparison.
Eclipse and astrology claims
Vera wrote that a planetary alignment would form what he called a cosmic cross around Earth, involving the Sun, the Moon, Uranus, Jupiter, Mercury, Saturn and Mars, and said the resulting shadow and penumbra would cover more than half of Spain. He linked the eclipse to predictions he attributed to Nostradamus, which he said had been updated by Spanish astrologer Rappel, and referenced former Socialist minister Leire Pajín, who he said had once predicted misfortune for former Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero.
Vera closed the column by describing Sánchez's Canary Islands retreat, which he said includes 10,000 square meters of gardens, three swimming pools, a lake, a heliport and a private beach, where he said the prime minister is spending time with his wife, Begoña Gómez. Vera concluded that both the eclipse coverage and the situation in Ceuta amount to what he sarcastically called the new normal.
