Qibla direction in Torrance

How to face the Qibla in Torrance

Stand where you will pray and find north first. Then turn towards north and move a further 23.8° towards east: the result is the bearing of 23.8°. 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 Torrance to Mecca points to 95.1° (east), a full 71.3° away from the true Qibla of 23.8° (north-east). The map line keeps one compass heading and is 2,146 km longer than the great-circle route. Because the Earth is a sphere, the shortest way to Mecca from Torrance 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 33.8359° N, 118.3406° 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 Torrance to Mecca and Medina

Mecca is 13,450 km from Torrance as the crow flies, and Medina, the city of the Prophet ﷺ, is 13,126 km away. A direct flight would take roughly 16 h 19 min, although most pilgrims from Torrance connect through Jeddah or Medina airport.

Clocks in Torrance 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 Torrance rather than those of Mecca.

Finding the Qibla with the sun in Torrance

From Torrance the sun never rises high in the Qibla direction of 23.8°, 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 Torrance (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 Torrance points straight to Mecca.

Torrance compared with other cities

Compared with Washington D.C., 3,709 km away, the Qibla in Torrance is turned 32.8° further anticlockwise (23.8° against 56.6°), and Mecca is 2,817 km farther away. The nearest city with its own Qibla page, Long Beach (16 km), prays towards 24.0°, a difference of 0.2°.

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 Torrance

• Long Beach24.0° · 16 km
• Downey24.0° · 22 km
• Los Angeles23.9° · 26 km
• Huntington Beach24.2° · 37 km
• Burbank23.8° · 38 km
• El Monte24.1° · 39 km