Coll de Sóller from Sóller: 25 hairpins, counted, on the road the tunnel emptied

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This was the main road into the Sóller valley, which made it a working mountain pass and a poor place to ride a bicycle. Then, in February 1997, a tunnel opened underneath it, and the Ma-11A stopped being anybody’s route to anywhere. What is left is 8.5 km of empty road with 25 hairpins on it — more than any of the other 115 climb-sides we have counted on this island.

Length

8.5 km

from the plaça in Sóller at 34 m to the pass at 497 m

Height gained

463 m

4th largest of 75 published climb-sides

Average gradient

5.5%

steepest kilometre 6.9%, from km 2.8

Hairpins

25

counted from the centreline; 1st of 116 climb-sides

Three guides, three hairpin counts, and none of them says what a hairpin is

This is not a criticism of the guides. Nobody has ever written the rule down, so every count is a different question answered honestly. Ride it and try to count, and you will understand the problem — one guide says so in as many words: “we counted 30 hairpins in total – but the truth is that it’s difficult to keep count!”

So we wrote the rule down and measured it. The road centreline was already here — it is the same OpenStreetMap geometry every gradient on this site is sampled along. Bearings are taken every 5 m, consecutive turns in the same direction are added into one bend, and a bend ends when the road has turned 25° back the other way. A bend that turns at least 135° within 150 m of road is a hairpin: the angle makes it a switchback rather than a corner, and the distance makes it a switchback rather than a road going slowly round a mountain.

Under that rule the Sóller side has 25. Drop the distance condition — count every turn of 135° however long it takes — and it has 30, which is the number Epic Road Rides counted from the saddle. Neither figure is more correct. They are answers to two different questions, and the reason three guides disagree is that nobody had asked which question they were answering.

The table says something the count alone does not. The first hairpin is at km 2.9 and the last at km 8.2: every one of the 25 falls inside 5.3 km, which is 4.7 per kilometre through the middle of the climb. The bottom three kilometres out of the valley are almost straight. You do not ease into this road; it starts turning and then does not stop.

Every measured road on the island has now been through the same rule. The twistiest roads on Mallorca ranks all 116 of them, draws where the 135° threshold falls in the distribution of every counted turn, and checks four published counts against the stretch of road each one names — three of the four come back.

The tunnel is why you can ride it

Two decades of the most expensive toll in Spain is an unusual thing to find in a cycling guide, but it is the whole explanation for the road’s traffic. Between 1997 and 2017 the pass was the free alternative to a €5.10 tunnel, so a share of the valley’s traffic still came over the top. Since the barriers came up on 28 December 2017 there has been no reason at all to drive it — and there is now, as one guide puts it, “There is little traffic (due to the tunnel for cars and coaches).”

Source Epic Road Rides · checked 6 August 2026The same guide adds the qualifier that matters on a descent: “There is not a lot of traffic on the route, but don’t assume there will be none.”

That qualifier is the one to keep in your head on the way down. An empty road with 25 blind hairpins and a 10.5% maximum gradient is not an empty road on the corner where a hire car is coming the other way.

What is being done to the surface

Source Ultima Hora · checked 6 August 2026

Thirteen kilometres is both sides of the pass and then some — this climb is 8.5 km and the Bunyola side is 7.6 km. It would be easy to assume the phasing held and both sections are done by now. The Consell’s own roadmap says otherwise.

In September 2025 the Consell said the reform of two Serra de Tramuntana roads on its roadmap — the Coll de Sóller and Sa Calobra — would carry on into the following year.

Source Ultima Hora · checked 7 August 2026Reported 3 September 2025: «Para el próximo año está previsto seguir adelante con la reforma de dos carreteras de la Serra de Tramuntana que están dentro del libro de ruta: las del Coll de Sóller y Sa Calobra.» “El próximo año” from a September 2025 report is 2026, which is now. It is a statement of intent, not of progress: neither we nor it says how much of either road is done.

Nothing published since says which of the two phases is finished, so the useful expectation for a 2026 descent is a road with work somewhere on it: fresh tarmac on one stretch, cones and a running surface on another, and no way to know from here which is which. The Consell’s roads pages are where the current answer lives, and it is worth thirty seconds before you commit to 8.5 km of descending you cannot see round.

The climb itself

It is a steady climb with an awkward middle. 5.3 km of it sits between 4 and 6% and another 2.2 km between 6 and 8; the hardest kilometre is the third, at 6.9%, and it arrives exactly where the hairpins start. Against the island median of 192 m of gain this is a large climb — 4th of 75 — but it is nothing like the hardest, and everyone who rides it remembers the corners rather than the gradient.

The other side

The pass has two sides and they are not the same climb. From Bunyola it is 7.6 km at 4.3% for 330 m, with 18 hairpins — fewer, longer, and on a road that keeps more of the view south towards Palma. Ridden as a loop out of Sóller, take this side up: it holds 7 more hairpins than the other one, and hairpins are worth more climbing than descending. The Bunyola side has its own page.

Everyone’s figures are shorter than ours, and it is the same disagreement every time

The air at the top, and what the way down feels like

The old pass is the shaded one, and the valley under it keeps the sun off until late in the morning. Every figure here is measured under an open sky, so read the early rows as the warm version of what this road actually gives you.

You finish this climb 463 m above where you started it, and the air knows. In January — the coldest month at this top — the foot of the climb averages 14.2 °C around 12:00 while the top averages 10.3 °C. That is a different set of clothes at each end: 3.9 °C bought with 463 m of climbing. In July the same top sits at 27.4 °C.

Then you turn round. Going down at 30–50 km/h you make your own wind, and at 08:00 in January the air at this top — 6.1 °C standing still — feels like 1.5 °C at the slower speed and 0.2 °C at the faster one. By 12:00 the air at this top has climbed back above the range the index is published for, in every month of the year: the cold descent from here is an early one, not a high one. Whatever you would wear on the way up, the way down is the reason the gilet is in the pocket.

Two thermometers 1,007 m apart define a line, not a surface, so a top on the north coast reads a figure taken across the island. Every figure here is measured under an open sky: where the mountain's own shadow lies, read the table as the warm version of the morning. What the temperatures do across the whole island, and what to put in the pocket, is on the kit guide.

Riding it

The obvious ride is the loop: out of Sóller over the pass, down to Bunyola, and back through the tunnel — except that the tunnel is not a place to take a bicycle, so the loop is really up one side and back over the other, or out to Palma the long way. The other obvious ride is the pairing this valley is famous for: this pass and Puig Major from Sóller, which leaves the same square and is the exact opposite road — 15.4 km with 4 hairpins on it.

Stay in the valley and both are on your doorstep before the coaches are awake: Sóller itself, or Port de Sóller two kilometres down the valley. From the south side, Bunyola sits at the foot of the other ascent, on the Palma side of the mountain.

Verified Every figure on this page was re-checked against its source on 6 August 2026. Next review due within 120 days.