Mallorca's climbs, measured

Look up any Mallorcan climb and you will find three different sets of numbers for it. Sa Calobra is 9.4 km or 9.5 km or 10 km; it gains 668 m or 654 m or 682 m; it averages 6.3% or 7.0% or 7.1%. The figures disagree because they come from different places — one person’s bike computer, another site’s copy of a third site — and almost nobody states how they got theirs, so there is no way to tell which to believe.

This page takes the other approach. Every climb here is measured the same way, from the same two public datasets, by one script, measure-climbs.mjs: the centreline of the road that actually crosses the pass, sampled every 10 m against the Spanish national terrain model at 5 m resolution. The individual numbers may still be argued with. What they are not is incomparable with each other.

And the list is no longer just the famous ones. The inventory is queried from OpenStreetMap rather than written down — 52 named passes that sit on a paved road, plus 52 summits a paved road dead-ends at, sifted out of 895 candidate landmarks. That second rule is the one that matters: 20 of the climbs below are roads that go up something and stop, because a sanctuary or a lighthouse is the only thing at the top. A pass-shaped rule cannot see them, and the pass-shaped lists do not have them.

Climb-sides published

75

121 measured; the 46 that fall below the bar are listed further down rather than hidden

Total ascent catalogued

16,976 m

over 423 km of climbing road, in all six comarques

Steepest kilometre on the island

15.6%

Puig de sa Coma Fosca, from Gènova

Elevation source

IGN 5 m

Spain’s national digital terrain model — not a GPS trace, not a phone barometer

Find a climb

Search a village to see what starts there, filter to one part of the island, or order the whole set by whichever number you actually care about. The default order is the difficulty index — the square of the height gained divided by ten times the length, so a short steep climb outranks a long shallow one. The formula is printed here rather than described, because an unpublished ranking is just an opinion with a number next to it.

What gear you need, on the kilometre that decides it

Every gear calculator on the internet asks you for a gradient, and every rider guesses one — usually the average, which is the single number that cannot tell you whether you will get up a climb. What decides that is the hardest continuous kilometre, and this project measures one for all 75 climb-sides above. So the tool does not ask: pick the climb and it already knows.

The three hardest, drawn

Each kilometre is shaded by its own gradient, and every profile states its own vertical exaggeration — the factor by which the drawing makes the hill steeper than it is.

Where the list came from, and what was taken out of it

The inventory is derived, and the derivation is the thing that gets reviewed. A script asks OpenStreetMap two questions — the top is a named pass OpenStreetMap records on a paved road, or a named summit destination a paved road dead-ends at above 150 m, and its start is the nearest named settlement reachable from the top along the road without crossing a higher pass, at least 1.5 km away — and everything a human then changed is one line with a reason attached. Which is what this section is. An inventory nobody can audit is a list of opinions about which hills matter.

Tops the rule found and could not measure

10 named tops came back from the query with no village reachable from them without crossing a higher pass, and 4 more produced a climb shorter than 200 m, which means the village sits above the point where the road starts rising. Both are failures of the rule rather than absences, so they are printed rather than dropped — including the Cap de Formentor lighthouse, which is genuinely not one climb from Port de Pollença but two, with the Coll de la Creueta in between.

Measured, and below the bar

46 measured climb-sides are not in the table above. Two mechanical rules keep them out: an entry has to gain at least 100 m to be called a climb here, and where two named tops within 300 m share the same village, only the one that gains more stands. Both rules and every exclusion are printed, because a catalogue that quietly drops its awkward rows is not a catalogue.

Listed here, without a page of its own

Being in the table above is one bar; carrying a page of its own is a second one, and it is a different question. A page here holds the profile, the kilometre splits, the rank against every other climb on the island, the gear the steep part asks for, the other side of the same summit and the signposted routes that ride it — so a climb-side gets one when it can fill at least one of those: 3 kilometre splits or more, or 150 m gained or more, or a second measured side, or a place on one of the sixteen official routes. 74 of the 75 clear it. A climb that clears none would have a page repeating its own row, which is the padding this catalogue exists to avoid.

• Es Coll Riat, from Puigpunyent — 1.8 km and 108 m over 2 kilometre splits, with no second side measured and no official route across it: a page could show nothing its row above does not already show. It keeps its row in the finder above, with every figure the measurement produced.

47 of the 75 published climb-sides turn up on at least one of the Consell's sixteen signposted routes, and 23 on a route whose track we publish — so that section of a climb page is filled for about 63% of them and honestly absent for the rest.

Does the method actually work?

A consistent method is worth nothing if it is consistently wrong, so here is the check. 32 of these passes can be checked against an altitude we did not produce this way: every one carries an elevation tag in OpenStreetMap, published by somebody who is not us, and 3 of them were also measured separately by this project from the Mallorca 312 organiser's official GPX tracks — barometric and GPS elevations recorded on the road, sharing nothing with a LiDAR terrain model except the mountain. That is 35 checks in all. Across 35 checks the median disagreement is 2 m and 32 of them fall inside 10 m. 3 do not, and all 3 are dealt with below rather than averaged away.

Only passes are in this table. A pass node sits on the road, so its tag and our figure describe the same point; a peak node does not — the road to the Santuari de Sant Salvador stops 32 m below the top of the mountain it is named after, and putting that difference in an accuracy table would manufacture an error out of a fact. Including the peaks would have moved the median from 2 m to 5 m, and none of the extra spread would have meant anything.

The three that disagree by more than ten metres

Each was put to four elevation models that share nothing with each other. In all three the figure standing alone is OpenStreetMap's own tag — which is a finding rather than a defence, because two of those tags are what other climb databases copy.

Where our numbers disagree with everyone else's

One of those three is not like the others. Every source we checked puts the top of Sa Calobra at 682 m. Four independent elevation models put the road's high point at 723–725 m — a 41 m gap, against a median of 2.0 m across all 35 checks. That is why it is worth explaining rather than quietly publishing over.

The explanation turns out to be dull, which is the best kind. The published figures describe a climb that stops about 600 m short of the top of the road.

How we got this At 9.4 km from the port — the length almost everyone publishes — our series reads 670 m, twelve metres from the 682 m everyone publishes as the summit. The road then climbs for another 600 m to its actual high point at 723 m. Two descriptions of the same road that stop in different places, not two contradictory measurements of the same thing.Computed from Our 10 m elevation series for the Ma-2141, against the 9.4 km / 682 m figures in common circulation.Computed 5 August 2026.

Two things that decide whether you can ride a climb at all

Formentor: cars are banned for five months, bicycles are not

Bicycles are exempt. Access during the restricted hours is permitted on foot, by bicycle, by the TIB shuttle bus, and for authorised vehicles — taxis, emergency services, blue-badge holders and residents with property inside the zone.

Source Dirección General de Tráfico (DGT) · checked 5 August 2026The restriction has two levels: the beach section from km 2.0 to km 8.0, where cars are admitted until the car park fills, and the lighthouse section from km 8.7, where only authorised vehicles pass at all.

The dates are the interesting part, because the two authorities do not publish the same ones — and the difference is three days at the end of the season, which is exactly when a cyclist plans a shoulder-month trip around it.

The Serra is being instrumented

210 cameras — 105 with number-plate readers and vehicle counting, 105 for surveillance — plus 20 sound meters and 32 control zones across the Serra de Tramuntana, for €1 million. The first 64 devices are going in on the Lluc–Sa Calobra road and at the Caimari entrance, and the system is to be fully operational by October 2026.

Source Ultima Hora · checked 5 August 2026Reported 25 July 2026. The stated purposes are illegal racing, noise, and counting vehicles entering from outside Mallorca ahead of a vehicle-entry law still in parliament; the article notes the AI can distinguish vehicle types and detect bicycles.

How these numbers were made

1. The inventory is queried from OpenStreetMap rather than written down: every named pass on a paved road, and every named summit a paved road dead-ends at above 150 m. Each entry carries the OSM id of its top and of the village it starts from.
2. Ways tagged as closed to the public — private, no, customers, permit — are removed from the road network before anything is routed, so no climb here is measured up somebody’s drive. A road shut to cars but open to bicycles is kept.
3. The road is the OpenStreetMap centreline of whichever road actually crosses the pass — not a GPS trace of one ride, so no rider’s wander or lost signal is in the number.
4. Elevation is sampled every 10 m from the Spanish national 5 m terrain model, and interpolated in a straight line through tunnels and over bridges, where a terrain model reads the mountain above or the valley below.
5. The foot of the climb is the lowest point on that road between the summit and the named village. The distance from the village to the foot is reported separately, because on several of these climbs it is kilometres.
6. Height gained is summit minus foot. It is not a running total of every rise, which depends entirely on the sampling interval and is the single biggest reason published figures disagree.
7. Average gradient is height gained over length — not the mean of the per-sample gradients, which over-weights the flat bits.
8. The steepest kilometre is the largest height gain over any 1,000 m window on the climb, sliding 10 m at a time.

Road geometry © OpenStreetMap contributors, available under the Open Database Licence — the road network, the 52 passes, the 218 settlements, and the comarca boundaries that place each climb on the island. Elevation from the Instituto Geográfico Nacional (CC BY 4.0 scne.es). The inventory was queried from OpenStreetMap on 5 August 2026; every top carries the OSM id of the node it came from, recorded in climbs.inventory.json and reviewed in climb-defs.mjs.

The gear this island actually asks for

The steepest kilometre in the whole catalogue is 15.6% — on Puig de sa Coma Fosca, from Gènova — and the longest continuous climb is 18.9 km, Puig Major from Lluc. That is a combination that punishes a compact-and-11-28 setup far less than the Alps would, and far more than a first-time visitor expects: the Tramuntana's difficulty is its relentlessness rather than its ramps — and the ramps that do exist are mostly outside it, on the short roads up to the sanctuaries.

We have no commercial relationship with any Mallorcan bike-hire company yet, so there is nothing to recommend here and we are not going to invent one. For the part of the trip we can help with — a hire car to reach the Tramuntana from Palma, or somewhere to stay at the foot of it — the links are marked and pay us if you use them.