Where to stay for a cycling week

Where you sleep decides which climbs you can ride from the door, and the difference is large. 40 of the island's published climbs (counting each direction up a pass separately) start within 30 km of Valldemossa by road; only 3 start within 30 km of Colònia de Sant Jordi. That is 13.3 times the choice for the same week off work. Below are the 18 towns with enough beds to book, ranked on what you can reach from each by bike.

All the bases compared

The hard part of choosing a base here is that the beds are on the coast and the climbing is inland. The towns on the plain closest to the mountains, Inca, Sineu and Campos, all failed the first rule below, because the island licenses almost no beds in them. The hotels are on the coast, so the practical question is which stretch of coast sits closest to the Tramuntana mountains.

What counts as a base

32 towns were measured and 18 have a page. Three rules, applied in this order, decide which. Every town that failed one is listed below with the figure it failed on.

1. Somewhere to stay. At least 10 establishments licensed to trade within 2 km, or at least 1,000 registered bed places. Both figures come from the Consell de Mallorca's island accommodation register, read 7 August 2026: 1,854 establishments and 309,008 bed places across Mallorca, republished daily. A town is credited with an establishment when the register files it under that town and puts it inside the circle — the count alone would give Cala Bona its neighbour's hotels 1.2 km away, and the register's own locality alone would give Campos farmhouses spread across the municipality. There are two tests because counting establishments misses a single big hotel: es Camp de Mar is eight establishments and 3,108 beds. 11 towns failed here.
2. Something to ride. At least one published climb whose foot is within 30 km by road. No town on the island failed it: Mallorca is small enough that everywhere has a climb nearby.
3. One page per riding area. Where two qualifying towns sit within 12 km of each other by road and 85% or more of the climbs within reach of one are also within reach of the other, the page goes to the town with more places to stay and it names the other. Cala Bona and Cala Millor are 1.2 km apart and have 91% of the climbs within reach in common, so they share one page. Three towns were folded in this way.

One departure from the rules

Rule 3 hands a merged pair to whichever town has more places to stay. That is the right tie-break almost everywhere and the wrong one once:

• Platja de Muro keeps the page instead of Ca'n Picafort. The Mallorca 312 starts and finishes at Platja de Muro, and the eight pages about that race, in two languages, need a base page they can link to.

The towns without a page

32 towns were measured. These 14 did not get a page, and the table gives the reason for each, using the same figures the rules were applied to.

What the guides say

Two of the leading guides to this question were read on 6 August 2026. Both name bases. Neither backs its picks with figures, such as a road distance to a climb, a count of climbs nearby or a transfer distance:

• Cycle Fiesta puts Port de Pollença, Alcúdia, Port de Sóller, Selva, Alaró and Banyalbufar forward as bases, and names Magaluf, Palmanova, s’Arenal, Can Pastilla and Can Picafort among the places not to stay — on character, traffic and scenery. The Best and Worst Bases in Mallorca for a Cycling Holiday, read 6 August 2026.
• Epic Road Rides puts Port de Pollença, Port d’Alcúdia, Sóller, Campanet and Palma forward as bases, without quantifying what any of them puts within reach of a bicycle. Cycling Mallorca — your ultimate guide, read 6 August 2026.

Those guides judge character, traffic and scenery, which road distances cannot measure, and a week in Palmanova will feel different from a week in Port de Pollença whatever the numbers say. On road access to climbs, though, the towns one guide tells you to avoid come out well ahead of the town both of them recommend. Palmanova reaches 33 published climbs within 30 km; Port de Pollença reaches 9. Both figures are in the table above.

About the drive from the airport

Every base here is reached from the same airport, so the transfer column measures the same journey for all of them: the length of the quickest driving route from the terminals at Aeroport de Palma - Son Sant Joan. It is a distance, not a journey time, so it takes no account of traffic on the Ma-19 in August. Checked against an independent router on its own copy of the same map, 32 of these figures agree to a median of 3.7% and 23 of them are within 5%. The exception is Palma: our driving distances ignore one-way streets, which makes no difference when a transfer ends at a resort on a bay but adds a good deal when it ends inside an old town of one-way streets.

How we got this a second road graph, built for this measurement alone: motorway and its slip roads included, cycleways excluded, the bicycle access filter off — because a rider arrives by taxi or hire car and the shortest ridable path is not that journey. Edges are weighted by the posted maxspeed where OpenStreetMap has one and by road class where it does not, so the route is the one a driver takes rather than the shortest line. It is a distance, not a journey time: nothing here models traffic.Computed from the length of the quickest driving route from the terminal buildings at Palma airport to each town’s OpenStreetMap place node.Computed 6 August 2026.

Booking a bed in any of them

Each town has its own page listing the climbs that start from it, with an accommodation search for that town alone. The ranking above is built only from road distances and height gained, so it tells you nothing about the hotels themselves.

From half of these bases the best riding is beyond a comfortable spin, and a car widens what you can ride in a week: compare Mallorca car hire.

How this site is researched, measured and paid for is set out in full on the methodology page.

Verified Every figure on this page was re-checked against its source on 6 August 2026. Next review due within 180 days.