A total solar eclipse occurred at the Moon’s descending node of the orbit on Thursday, July 11, 1991. A solar eclipse occurs when the Moon passes between Earth and the Sun, thereby totally or partly obscuring the image of the Sun for a viewer on Earth. A total solar eclipse occurs when the Moon's apparent diameter is larger than the Sun's, blocking all direct sunlight, turning day into darkness. Totality occurs in a narrow path across Earth's surface, with the partial solar eclipse visible over a surrounding region thousands of kilometres wide. Totality began over the Pacific Ocean and Hawaii moving across Mexico, down through Central America and across South America ending over Brazil. It lasted for 6 minutes and 53.08 seconds at the point of maximum eclipse. There will not be a longer total eclipse until June 13, 2132. This was the largest total solar eclipse of Solar Saros series 136, because eclipse magnitude was 1.07997.

This eclipse was the most central total eclipse in 800 years, with a gamma of -.0041. There will not be a more central eclipse for another 800 years. Its magnitude was also greater than any eclipse since the 6th century.

• Animation of eclipse path
• View near the end of totality, Playas del Coco, Guanacaste, Costa Rica
• Partial phase before totality as seen through the cloud cover, Playas del Coco, Guanacaste, Costa Rica

The American ethnographer and anthropologist Victoria Bricker and her late husband and colleague Harvey Bricker, claim in their book "Astronomy in the Maya Codices" that by decoding pre-Columbian glyphs from the four Maya codices they discovered that pre-16th century Mayan astronomers predicted the solar eclipse of July 11, 1991.^[1] In their 2011 volume, the husband-wife Brickers team explain how they translated the dates from the Mayan calendar, then used modern scientific knowledge of planetary orbits to line up the data from the Mayan prediction with our calendar.^[2] Reviewers disputed the claim in 2014, concluding that, "loose hieroglyphic readings and accommodating pattern matching occurs throughout the book."^[3]