Provincia de Soria Starlight Reserve

The province of Soria, in Castilla y León in north central Spain, is a Starlight Reserve as a whole territory. The Fundación Starlight presented the certificate at the FITUR tourism fair in January 2024 and called Soria the first province in the world to become a Starlight Reserve. Starlight says the province has kept some of the best skies in Spain, and it ties that to the sparse population the province once treated as a weakness. To qualify, the provincial council and its municipalities signed on to the 2007 La Palma Declaration on defending the night sky, and Starlight carried out its own measurements.

The provincial council also won the Starlight award for best lighting project for its work on protecting the sky. Soria's first Starlight certification came well before the reserve. The municipality of Muriel Viejo, in the Pinares district, earned it at the end of 2017. Starlight names Borobia, Muriel Viejo and Tiermes among the villages that already offer sky tourism, and Tierras Altas de Soria became a Starlight Tourism Destination in February 2025.

Our light pollution map estimates Bortle 2 at the point we use, and Starlight has not published a single sky quality figure for the province. Because the reserve covers a whole province, your spot matters more than the label, so it helps to start from one of the named villages. At about 41.6 degrees north the Milky Way core peaks near 19 degrees above the southern horizon. Our data gives May, June and July the most core hours.