Cycling in Mallorca: the routes, the season and what nobody tells you

Mallorca is the most concentrated piece of road cycling in Europe, and that is a statement about geometry rather than enthusiasm. A mountain range 90 km long runs down the north-west coast with a single road along the spine of it. A flat agricultural plain fills the middle. Everything is within about two hours of everything else, and an airport sits in the corner with flights from most of northern Europe.

That combination is why half the professional peloton spends February there, and it is also why a February morning on the Coll de Femenia involves being passed by roughly one club run per minute. Both facts are true, and the second one is the part nobody puts in the brochure.

Here is what the riding actually consists of, when to go, and what to expect when you get there.

The Serra de Tramuntana, which is the whole reason

The Tramuntana runs north-east to south-west along the far coast, rising to just over 1,400 m at Puig Major. The Ma-10 threads along it for most of its length, and almost every good ride on the island either uses that road or climbs up to it.

The character is Mediterranean limestone: pale rock, pine and holm oak, drystone terraces, and a coastline that drops into the sea rather than sloping towards it. Gradients are moderate by Alpine standards. Very little of it is above 10%, and most of the well-known climbs sit between 5 and 7% — which means they reward steady, sustained effort rather than the ability to survive a wall. If you have never paced a long climb with power, Mallorca is an unusually forgiving place to learn, because nothing on the island forces you into a gradient you cannot control.

Sa Calobra deserves its reputation and also a warning

About 9.4 km at roughly 7%, from the sea at Cala de sa Calobra up to the Coll dels Reis. The gradient is remarkably even, the surface is good, and because you have to descend it before you climb it, you get to inspect every corner on the way down. It is a near-perfect measuring stick: one sustained effort, no descents in the middle, repeatable year after year.

The warning is that it is a single-track-ish mountain road with a car park and a tourist boat at the bottom, which means coaches. In season, the descent is busy with vehicles that cannot move over because there is nowhere to move over to. Ride it early. If your descending is rusty, braking, lines and where to look is worth reading on the plane.

The Pla: the flat bit in the middle that everyone underrates

The centre of Mallorca is a flat agricultural plain dotted with small towns — Sineu, Petra, Montuïri, Algaida, Porreres — connected by narrow lanes with very little traffic. It is not spectacular. It is, however, where you do your steady endurance riding, where you shelter when the Tramuntana is in cloud, and where a group of mixed ability can ride together without anybody being dropped.

A well-built week uses both: hills two or three days, the plain on the others. Camps that climb every day tend to produce riders who go home tired rather than fitter, which is a real risk given how easy the island makes it to overreach. Research on deliberate overload blocks suggests the fitness benefit shows up only if the block is followed by enough recovery — the block on its own just makes you slower for a fortnight.

February to April is the training season. July is not.

This is the part where the numbers do the arguing. The chart below is drawn from AEMET's standard climate values for Palma airport over 1981–2010 — mean daily maximum temperature, and monthly rainfall.

March is the driest month of the first half of the year — 26 mm across the whole month — and the mean daily maximum is 17.5 °C. February is cooler at 15.4 °C but almost as dry. April warms to 19.8 °C. That is close to ideal for riding five or six hours a day: warm enough that you are not fighting the cold, cool enough that heat is not the limiter.

July and August are a different island. Mean daily maxima of 31.2 and 31.3 °C, with almost no rain and over 340 hours of sunshine in July. Heat is a genuine performance limiter, not an inconvenience — core temperature rises, cardiovascular strain increases, and sustainable power falls. You can ride in it at five in the morning. You cannot do a productive six-hour training day in it in the afternoon.

October and November are the wettest months, at 62 and 55 mm, and autumn is when the Tramuntana collects cloud on the seaward side. Riding then is perfectly possible. It is simply less reliable.

The cold-in-February trap

Palma's February mean daily minimum is 4.0 °C. Apply the normal drop with altitude and a dawn start at Lluc, 500 m up, can be near freezing — and you are about to descend for 20 minutes at 50 km/h having just sweated up the other side. More camps are ruined by an under-dressed descent than by any hill. Pack a gilet and long fingers, and read how to dress between 0 and 15 °C before you assume "Mediterranean" means "warm".

Where to base yourself

• Port de Pollença and Alcúdia (north). The default, and for good reason: you are 15 minutes from the foot of the Tramuntana, you can reach Sa Calobra and Formentor from the door, and the flat roads towards Sa Pobla give you easy days. Also the busiest with other cyclists by a wide margin.
• Sóller and Port de Sóller (west). Surrounded by mountains rather than adjacent to them. Every ride starts with a climb, which is either the point or a problem depending on who you are.
• Palma (south). Underrated. You get a real city, and the Coll de Sóller is reachable without a transfer. You also get suburban traffic for the first half hour of every ride.
• The east coast. Quieter, flatter, cheaper, and a long way from the mountains. Fine if your training is mostly endurance; frustrating if you came for climbs.

The transfer time from the airport is short to all of them, which is the part that makes Mallorca work as a long weekend rather than only as a week. Our guide to turning a route into a day-by-day itinerary covers how to sequence the days once you have picked a base.

The honest downsides

The Ma-10 in season. The mountain road is the only road, so it carries cyclists, hire cars, coaches and local traffic on the same narrow tarmac. Between March and May the volume is high and drivers are frequently overtaking groups on blind bends. It is not dangerous in the way a British A-road is dangerous, but it is not the empty mountain pass the photographs imply.

Other cyclists. In peak camp season you will share every climb with dozens of riders, several of whom are on a guided tour and riding two abreast. Sa Calobra can have a queue at the bottom. If the appeal of a mountain road is solitude, go in late January or in early June instead.

Wind. The island is small and surrounded by sea, and the coastal sections — the run out to Formentor especially — are exposed. A route that felt easy on the way out can be an hour longer coming home. Knowing how to read a wind forecast is worth more here than an extra sprocket.

The plain is dull in bad weather. When the mountains are shut in, the flat roads are your fallback, and they are genuinely repetitive. Two consecutive days of them is character-building in the wrong direction.

Getting something out of the trip

The mistake most riders make is treating a Mallorca week as a single enormous block of climbing and going home wrecked. A better structure is three hard days spread across the week, with the rest ridden easy on the plain — closer to the intensity distribution that well-trained endurance athletes actually use, and far more likely to leave you fitter in three weeks' time rather than merely more tired next Monday.

If you want to know what a climb feels like before you are standing at the bottom of it, Moveee Indoor will ride a GPX of Sa Calobra or Puig Major on your trainer in the browser, with the gradient driving the resistance, so the pacing decisions are ones you have already made once rather than ones you are inventing at the bottom of a climb you have never seen.

Go in March, base yourself in the north, climb three days out of six, and accept that you will not have the road to yourself. On those terms the island is very hard to beat.