Puig Major from Sóller: 848 metres, the biggest climb on Mallorca, and a summit nobody rides to

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Two roads climb out of Sóller and they are opposites. One turns back on itself 25 times in eight kilometres. The other is this: fifteen and a half kilometres of Ma-10 that almost never stops going up and almost never turns round, gaining 848 m — more than any other climb on this island — and finishing at a hole in the rock at 873 m, because the summit half a kilometre above it is a radar station and has been since the 1950s.

Length

15.4 km

from 25 m on the valley floor to the Túnel de Monnàber

Height gained

848 m

the largest of all 75 published climb-sides on the island

Average gradient

5.5%

flattered by a flat first kilometre and a dip at 9.0 km

Steepest kilometre

7.2%

from km 12.9, near the top

It is not the steepest climb here. It is the one that does not stop.

The island median is 192 m of height gain. This climb takes 848 m, which is 4.4 times the middle of the field and more than Sa Calobra, and it does it without ever getting properly steep: the steepest kilometre is 7.2%, which ranks 35th of 75. What it has instead is 9.4 km sitting between 6 and 8% — 61% of the whole climb in a single band. Nothing else on Mallorca holds one gradient for that long.

Read that table as a rider rather than as a table and it has three parts. The first kilometre is the town and the valley floor and does not count. From km 2 to km 9 the road climbs steadily at 5–7% through Fornalutx’s terraces. Then it gives some of it back — the kilometre from 9 to 10 is the only real rest on the climb, and 0.9 km of the ascent is genuinely downhill — and the last five kilometres are the hardest of all. The steepest kilometre on the climb is the one starting at km 12.9, which is to say: the hardest part arrives after you have already climbed 682 m.

Four hairpins in fifteen kilometres

Every road up the Serra is described as hairpinned, and on this one it is not true. We counted the bends on all 116 measured climb-sides on the island from the same road centreline the gradients come from, under one published rule — a turn of at least 135° taken inside 150 m of road. Puig Major from Sóller has 4. The Coll de Sóller, which starts in the same town square, has 25 in barely half the distance.

That is the character of the climb in one number. It is an engineered mountain road built to a gradient, not a lane switchbacking up a wall — which is why it is possible to ride the whole thing seated in a rhythm, and why the descent is fast enough to be dangerous rather than technical enough to be slow.

For what the other end of that scale looks like, the twistiest roads on Mallorca ranks all 116 counted climb-sides by the same rule.

409 m of the climb are underground

The Ma-10 goes through the mountain rather than over it, more than once, and the last of those holes is the top of the climb: the Túnel de Monnàber, the highest point a bicycle can legally reach on this island. 409 m of the 15.4 km — 2.7% of the climb — is inside rock.

Riding into an unlit tunnel out of Mediterranean glare is the one genuine hazard on the ascent and the reason a rear light belongs in a summer jersey pocket here. What the tunnels are like on the day — lighting, surface, whether anything is being worked on — is not something a terrain model can see, and this page does not pretend otherwise.

The summit is not yours, and that is why the road stops

The climb ends at 873 m and the mountain goes on for another 565 m above it. The road up those last metres exists — it is how the equipment got there — and it is not open. The Spanish air force’s 7th Air Surveillance Squadron has held the summit since the 1950s.

Source Ejército del Aire y del Espacio · checked 6 August 2026

The mountain’s published height is 1,445 m and the mountain is not 1,445 m any more. 9 metres of the summit were removed in 1958 to seat the station, and the figure most guides still print is the one from before that happened.

It is a small thing that tells you something true about this summit: it is the one place in the Serra de Tramuntana that was rebuilt to a specification.

Everyone else’s climb is shorter than ours, and neither of us is wrong

We start climbs at the town they are ridden from, because that is where a rider starts; most guides start them where the gradient does. The difference is the flat run out of Sóller, and it is checkable rather than arguable: Take the last 13.9 km of our own series and it climbs 827 m at 6.0% — against the 13.9 km at 6.2% Ultima Hora publishes.

How we got this The published length is subtracted from ours, the elevation at that point read off our own series, and the gradient recomputed over the same distance. Nothing is fitted: the only choice is where to start, which is the whole disagreement.Computed from our measured elevation series for Puig Major from Sóller, and Ultima Hora’s published figures.Computed 7 August 2026.

Use whichever suits what you are doing. For comparing this climb with the other 74 on the atlas, use ours — they were all measured the same way, and that consistency is the only reason to measure them again at all. For talking to somebody about Puig Major, use theirs, because that is the number the conversation is already using.

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

This is the highest air a bicycle can legally reach on Mallorca, and it is the coldest place on the island to turn round on. Of every top in these records, only Puig Major, Coll dels Reis and Coll de sa Batalla read below freezing on an early descent — and this one is the coldest of them.

You finish this climb 848 m above where you started it, and the air knows. In January — the coldest month at this top — the foot of the climb averages 14.3 °C around 12:00 while the top averages 7.2 °C. That is a different set of clothes at each end: 7.1 °C bought with 848 m of climbing. In July the same top sits at 25.2 °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 — 4.9 °C standing still — feels like -0.1 °C at the slower speed and -1.5 °C at the faster one. Ride it at 12:00 instead and the same descent reads 1.7 °C to 2.9 °C — the index speaks about the middle of the day here in four months of the twelve. 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

Three municipalities, one road, and no shortcut off it: Sóller, then Fornalutx, then Escorca at the south tunnel mouth. Fill your bottles at the bottom. 6 places on this climb can fill one and 5 of them are inside the first 1.5 km; the last of all of them is Mirador de ses Barques at km 7.4, and after it there is 7.6 km with nothing at all. There is no public tap for 14.9 km of the ascent, and nothing at the top but a tunnel. Over the far side the road runs past the Gorg Blau and Cúber reservoirs to Lluc; back the way you came is 15.4 km of descent into the valley you started in.

The two obvious rides that use it are the Sóller loop — up the Ma-10, down to Lluc, back over the Coll de Sóller — and the traverse of the whole Serra, which takes the same road in the other direction from Pollença.

Sleep at the bottom of it and the climb is a warm-up rather than a day out: Sóller puts you in the valley itself, and Port de Sóller two flat kilometres further out. If you are coming from Palma for the day, a hire car and the tunnel underneath this mountain will get you to the start in about forty minutes.

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