Qibla direction in El Monte

How to face the Qibla in El Monte

Stand where you will pray and find north first. Then turn towards north and move a further 24.1° towards east: the result is the bearing of 24.1°. A small error of a few degrees is forgiven by most scholars, but aiming simply at north would leave you about 24° off.

Scholars agree that someone who can see the Kaaba must face it exactly, while someone far away faces its direction (jihat al-Ka‘bah) as precisely as reasonably possible. If a mosque is nearby, its mihrab and prayer lines are the easiest reference, since they were set when the building was laid out. At home, mark the direction once with tape or a small arrow so the whole family prays the same way.

Why a flat map shows a different direction

This is a place where maps mislead badly: a straight line on a flat map from El Monte to Mecca points to 95.2° (east), a full 71.1° away from the true Qibla of 24.1° (north-east). The map line keeps one compass heading and is 2,134 km longer than the great-circle route. Because the Earth is a sphere, the shortest way to Mecca from El Monte first heads north-east, and that is the direction to face.

The angle on this page is the initial bearing of the great circle from 34.0686° N, 118.0276° W to the Kaaba (21.4225° N, 39.8262° E). It is the method used by mosque architects and by every serious Qibla calculator, and it gives one exact answer for each point on Earth.

Distance from El Monte to Mecca and Medina

Mecca is 13,415 km from El Monte as the crow flies, and Medina, the city of the Prophet ﷺ, is 13,091 km away. A direct flight would take roughly 16 h 17 min, although most pilgrims from El Monte connect through Jeddah or Medina airport.

Clocks in El Monte run 11 hours behind Mecca in winter and 10 hours behind Mecca in summer, because of daylight saving time. Prayer times, however, depend on the sun at your own location, so always use the prayer times of El Monte rather than those of Mecca.

Finding the Qibla with the sun in El Monte

From El Monte the sun never rises high in the Qibla direction of 24.1°, so you cannot simply face the sun. The opposite method works instead, as the right-hand column of the table shows.

On 365 days the sun stands exactly opposite the Qibla: then the shadow of any vertical object, a pole, a door frame or a plumb line, points straight towards Mecca. This is most frequent in January (31 days), for instance on 1 January 2027 at 13:27.

Twice a year the sun passes directly over the Kaaba, on 28 May 2027 and 16 July 2027. Both happen at night in El Monte (02:18 and 02:27 local time), so they cannot be used here. Instead, on 13 January 2027 at 13:29 and 28 November 2027 at 13:09 the sun is over the point opposite the Kaaba, and every vertical shadow in El Monte points straight to Mecca.

El Monte compared with other cities

Compared with Washington D.C., 3,673 km away, the Qibla in El Monte is turned 32.5° further anticlockwise (24.1° against 56.6°), and Mecca is 2,781 km farther away. The nearest city with its own Qibla page, Downey (17 km), prays towards 24.0°, a difference of 0.1°.

Across the 244 cities in the United States on this site, the Qibla ranges from 17.2° in Hillsboro to 350.9° in Anchorage, a spread of 333.7°. That is too large to use one national direction, so each city has its own bearing.

See all cities on the Qibla page for United States.

Qibla in cities near El Monte

• Downey24.0° · 17 km
• Los Angeles23.9° · 20 km
• Pomona24.4° · 25 km
• Anaheim24.2° · 28 km
• Burbank23.8° · 29 km
• Long Beach24.0° · 37 km