Sa Calobra cycling climb: 10 km at 7.1% to Coll dels Reis

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You ride Sa Calobra downhill first, and the only way back is up it. The Ma-2141 runs from the Serra’s spine down to a cove on the north coast and stops there. There is no onward road. You descend 10.0 km to the sea, and then you climb the same 10.0 km back out, or you wait for a boat.

Length

10.0 km

from 15 m at the port to the top of the road

Height gained

708 m

summit minus the lowest point on the road; 2 of 75 published climb-sides

Average gradient

7.1%

the one figure every source agrees on

Steepest kilometre

8.8%

from km 8.2

The climb, kilometre by kilometre

What makes Sa Calobra unusual is how steady it is: it hardly ever eases off. Antonio Parietti laid the road out to hold a near-constant gradient, and he succeeded: in the kilometre-by-kilometre table below, the gentlest kilometre and the steepest are 5.9% and 8.1%. On most climbs of this length that spread is three or four times wider. Once you have found a gear here, you can ride it for an hour.

Sa Calobra’s summit altitude, and which figure to use

Most guides give the top of Sa Calobra as 682 m. Spain’s national terrain model reads about 723 m at the top of the road. Both describe the same road: the usual figure stops about 600 m before the road’s high point. Use 682 m when you talk to other riders, because that is the number they know, and 723 m when you compare Sa Calobra with the other climbs in the atlas, which are all measured the same way.

Every published figure for Sa Calobra's altitude, length and gradient, and why they differ

Most English-language sources put the top of this climb at 682 metres: Wikipedia, PJAMM and the elevation tag on the pass node in OpenStreetMap. Spain’s national terrain model reads 723 m at that same node, and three other elevation models agree with it.

German sources give the higher figure. quaeldich.de, the climb database most German riders use, lists this pass as «Coll dels Reis (728 m)», five metres above our reading and forty-six above 682 m. Its other figures for the climb are close to ours as well.

Each source's figures for the climb

Published by	Publishes in	Length	Height gained	Gradient	Summit
quaeldich.de	German	10.1 km	710 m	7.0%	728 m
PJAMM Cycling	English	10.1 km	654 m	6.3%	682 m
passzwang.net	German	10.0 km	650 m	“knapp 7%”	682 m
Our measurement (IGN 5 m)	—	10.0 km	708 m	7.1%	723 m

PJAMM's metric figures are converted from 6.3 mi and 2,146 ft; that source publishes no metric set of its own. checked 5 August 2026.

quaeldich is within one reporting unit of our measurement on all four figures: +0.1 km on length, +2 m on height gained, −0.1 points on gradient and +5 m on the summit. No published source for this climb comes closer to our terrain model than this German one, and no English-language source comes near it.

How we got this Each source’s four figures differenced against ours, and the differences added after scaling each to its own reporting resolution — 0.1 km, 10 m, 0.1 percentage points, 10 m — so that no single quantity decides the ranking on units alone.Computed from The length, height gain, average gradient and summit altitude each publisher states, against our own measured record for the same climb.Computed 7 August 2026.

Two measurements can agree and both be wrong, so this does not prove the higher figure. It does show that 682 m is mainly an English-language figure. Look this climb up in German and the higher one is the first you meet.

The altitude at the top of the Ma-2141, according to each source

Altitude	Published by	In their words
682 m	Wikipedia (Sa Calobra)	Given as “the pass on 682 metres (2,238 ft) altitude”.
682 m	PJAMM Cycling	Their climb page ends the ascent at “Coll dels Reis at 682 meters”, over 6.3 mi with 2,146 ft gained at 6.3%.
682 m	OpenStreetMap node 1123226364	The elevation tag on the pass node itself.
682 m	passzwang.net	Takes the figure off the sign on the pass — «laut Passschild» — and notes in the same breath that altitudes «vielfach über 700m» circulate for it, so this German source already records the disagreement.
728 m	quaeldich.de	The German-language climb database heads the pass «Coll dels Reis (728 m)». It is 5 m above our own reading and 46 m above the figure the English-language sources share, and its length, height gain and gradient for the climb are within one unit of ours as well. The same publisher’s page for the Coll de Sa Bataia puts the pass 72 m higher again — «Coll dels Reis (mit 800 m der zweithöchster Pass)». The publisher does not give the pass one consistent altitude; 728 m is the figure on its own page for the pass.
723 m	Our measurement (IGN 5 m national terrain model)	EU-DEM 25 m reads 724.4 m, SRTM 30 m 725.0 m and Mapzen 725.0 m at the same point.

The English-language sources share 682 m, and the German climb database publishes 728 m. Ours sits between them, 5 m below the higher one. The one figure every source here agrees on is the gradient everyone quotes: 7.1%. checked 5 August 2026.

German Wikipedia also explains the length. It gives the road as «12,5 Kilometern Länge» against our 10.0 km, and both are right: 12.5 km is the whole road, and our figure is the climb from the port. You can add it up, because we measured both sides of this pass and the Ma-2141 runs through both.

How we got this The two measured sides of this pass between them cover the whole Ma-2141. Adding the metres each carries of that one road gives the length of the road itself. That is the figure other publishers state, and it is longer than the climb.Computed from Our measured road breakdown for both sides of the Coll dels Reis: 10019 m of Ma-2141 climbing from Sa Calobra, 2688 m of it on the Lluc side.Computed 7 August 2026.

The same article gives 682 m as a height difference over those 12.5 km, where every other source gives it as an altitude. On this road one number can pass for both, because the road starts only 15 m above the sea. We keep the two apart: 723 m is the altitude at the top, and 708 m is the height you climb.

The summit altitudes differ because the sources stop in different places. 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 below the 682 m most sources give as the summit. The road then climbs for another 600 m to its actual high point at 723 m. So the published figures and ours describe the same road and stop in different places. That is also why the sources that measure the road to its end, such as quaeldich with 10.1 km and 728 m, come out close to our figures.Computed from Our 10 m elevation series for the Ma-2141, against the 9.4 km / 682 m figures in common circulation.Computed 7 August 2026.

Whether the terrain model reads the road correctly: the same method checked on other summits

With a gap this size, the obvious worry is that the terrain model is reading a rock face beside the road instead of the road itself. Two checks rule that out. First, the same method lands close everywhere else: across 35 comparisons on 32 summits with an altitude from another source (32 against an altitude somebody else published and 3 against our separate measurement from the Mallorca 312 GPX tracks), the median difference is 2 m and 33 of them fall within 10 m. Second, sampling a 400-metre square around the Coll dels Reis node finds a smooth saddle between 694 m and 746 m, with no notch or cutting for a terrain model to misread.

The same method, checked against everyone else's altitudes

Summit	Ours	Theirs	Difference	Compared against
coll de sa Bastida	298 m	298 m	0 m	OpenStreetMap node 1621679173
Coll de sa Creu	322 m	322 m	0 m	OpenStreetMap node 1360452883
Coll de Sóller	497 m	497 m	0 m	OpenStreetMap node 26730946
coll de Tofla	261 m	261 m	0 m	OpenStreetMap node 9859055963
Coll dels Tords	276 m	276 m	0 m	OpenStreetMap node 306616949
Coll des Pescadors	374 m	374 m	0 m	OpenStreetMap node 9192893096
es Grau	331 m	331 m	0 m	OpenStreetMap node 9694410630
pas de na Bou	36 m	36 m	0 m	OpenStreetMap node 6357014881
Coll d'en Capó	360 m	360 m	−0 m	OpenStreetMap node 3397946917
Can Bleda	223 m	224 m	−1 m	OpenStreetMap node 12709284239
Coll d'en Claret	499 m	498 m	+1 m	OpenStreetMap node 2518205347
Coll d'Orient	499 m	498 m	+1 m	OpenStreetMap node 1280164782
coll de la Creueta	208 m	207 m	+1 m	OpenStreetMap node 384926035
Coll de n'Esteve	239 m	238 m	+1 m	OpenStreetMap node 8077008023
coll de s'Heura	323 m	322 m	+1 m	OpenStreetMap node 313984662
pas de can Bregat (Pollença)	23 m	24 m	−1 m	OpenStreetMap node 6357014877
Coll de Morell	196 m	194 m	+2 m	OpenStreetMap node 3068188469
Can Costa	426 m	424 m	+2 m	OpenStreetMap node 11810288320
Coll de sa Batalla	578 m	576 m	+2 m	OpenStreetMap node 1280164795
Coll de sa Coma	224 m	226 m	−2 m	OpenStreetMap node 12709284240
coll de sa Teulera	156 m	158 m	−2 m	OpenStreetMap node 306618681
Coll des Grau	466 m	468 m	−2 m	OpenStreetMap node 3978212050
Galilea	408 m	410 m	−2 m	OpenStreetMap node 26492767
Túnel de Monnàber	873 m	875 m	−2 m	OpenStreetMap node 9700247247
Coll des Racó	226 m	229 m	−3 m	OpenStreetMap node 271800720
Coll de sa Gramola	357 m	360 m	−3 m	OpenStreetMap node 1690751012
Coll des Pi	237 m	240 m	−3 m	OpenStreetMap node 1626869215
pas de l'Escala de l'amo en Joan Cerdà	134 m	130 m	+4 m	OpenStreetMap node 6357014817
Coll d'Honor	555 m	550 m	+5 m	OpenStreetMap node 356409154
Coll de Femenia	537 m	532 m	+5 m	our own measurement from the Mallorca 312 official GPX
Coll de sa Creu	378 m	384 m	−6 m	OpenStreetMap node 1360452952
Puig Major (MA-10 from Gorg Blau)	873 m	866 m	+7 m	our own measurement from the Mallorca 312 official GPX
Coll de sa Gramola	357 m	348 m	+9 m	our own measurement from the Mallorca 312 official GPX
Coll de Femenia	537 m	515 m	+22 m	OpenStreetMap node 765875444
Coll dels Reis	723 m	682 m	+41 m	OpenStreetMap node 1123226364

How we got this Each summit’s altitude from the IGN 5 m terrain model, minus the independently published figure for the same point. Passes only — a pass node is on the road, a peak node is not. Rows sorted by the size of the disagreement.Computed from OpenStreetMap elevation tags on the pass nodes, and our separate measurement of three summits from the Mallorca 312 organiser’s official GPX tracks.Computed 5 August 2026.

The road

The Ma-2141 was designed by Antonio Parietti, and the three sources we checked differ by a year — opened 1933 and built 1932.

Two of the three say 1932 and one says 1933, and none gives its own source. The likeliest explanation is that the road was built in one year and opened in the next, and the German edition’s «geplant und 1932 ausgeführt» says so most directly.

At one point the road passes under itself in a loop, the nus de sa corbata, or tie-knot. It is there because the road had to lose height in a place with no room to lose it. Taking the road under itself gave it the extra distance without boring through anything. OpenStreetMap confirms the shape: the loop is mapped as a bridge on layer=2, the road passing over itself.

The angle of the tie-knot loop, according to each source

The nus de sa corbata (the tie-knot loop): its angle according to each source

Angle of the loop	Published by	In their words
270°	Wikipedia (en)	A “270° spiral bridge called the tie knot”.
270°	PJAMM Cycling	Describes the “Nus de Sa Corbata” as a 270-degree turn at about kilometre 9.5 — which is also where our own path check puts the crossing, 9.46 km up.
360°	Dangerous Roads	Calls the nus de sa corbata “a curve of 360 degrees” — and, in the same page, describes the road “turning 270 degrees and going under itself”. Both figures come from this one source.
270°	Wikipedia (de)	Calls it a «270°-Kehrschleife», and is the only source here that says why it is there: at Sa Moleta, Parietti «sah nur die Möglichkeit» of losing the height that way.
270° and 360°	quaeldich.de	Its ascent text ends the climb «500 m vor der berühmten 270-Grad-Kurve am Coll dels Reis»; its own photo caption on the same page calls the same corner «die berühmte 360-Grad-Serpentine». The second source in this table to publish both figures itself.
255°	Our measurement (bend detection on the OpenStreetMap centreline)	The largest single turn our counter finds, with its apex 64 m from the bridge the map tags on layer 2. It measures how far the road’s centreline swings, which can differ from how far the structure itself carries you round.

Four publishers say 270°, and none of them says how they got it. The two that give 360° also print 270° on the same page, so 270° is the figure the sources share and 360° is a looser second one. Our own reading of the centreline is 255°. The difference from 270° comes from how the road bends either side of the bridge. checked 5 August 2026.

According to Dangerous Roads, the road was cut by hand, moving 31,000 m³ of rock, and was designed so that no tunnel was needed anywhere on it. There is one all the same: OpenStreetMap records a short tunnel on the Ma-2141. It is 28 m long, which is why the profile above says the elevation is interpolated across it. For comparison, the Puig Major climb from Sóller on the modern Ma-10 runs 409 m of its length underground.

How we got this The measurement flags every way tagged as a tunnel or a bridge and interpolates elevation between the portals. On this climb that flagged one tunnel — the metres are reported on the profile — and several bridges, one of them carrying the road over its own alignment on layer 2, which is the tie knot.Computed from OpenStreetMap way 667742888, tagged tunnel=yes on ref Ma-2141, and our own measured series.Computed 7 August 2026.

Everybody says 26 hairpins. It depends what you count.

Twenty-six is the number this road is famous for. Cycling UK prints it of the descent — “The fast, twisting 10km descent includes 26 hairpins” — and it is the figure most guides to the Ma-2141 repeat. Nobody who publishes it says what they counted.

Counted on the map, the climb has 15 true hairpins, meaning turns of at least 135° taken inside 150 m of road. Allow a turn of that size to spread over any length of road and there are 23; count every bend of 90° or more and there are 28. The number you hear depends on what the person counting called a hairpin. Sa Calobra is not the twistiest climb on the island on any of the three counts: on true hairpins it ranks 4 of 116. The full ranking, with every climb counted the same way, is on the twistiest roads on Mallorca.

How the bends were counted, and what other guides count

We counted the bends from the same OpenStreetMap centreline the gradients above are sampled along, using one rule for every road on the island: a turn of at least 135° taken inside 150 m of road.

The bends of the Ma-2141: our three counts and the 3 published ones

Counting	How many
Turns of at least 135° taken inside 150 m of road — our published rule	15
Turns of at least 135°, over any length of road	23
Turns of at least 90°, over any length of road	28
26 hairpins, plus the loop where the road passes under itself — Cycling UK	26
14 hairpins, in a stated stretch of road — PJAMM Cycling	14
12 hairpins, over the whole road rather than the climb — Wikipedia (de)	12

Our strict rule gives 15 for the whole climb, and 23 turns reach 135° over any length; 28 bends reach 90°. The two published counts that describe the whole road bracket our strict figure from both sides — 12 below it, 26 above — and they differ from each other by more than a factor of two on one road, because neither says what it counted as a hairpin. PJAMM’s 14 names the stretch it counted, and our count of that stretch matches it exactly. checked 6 August 2026.

The two published counts for the whole road sit either side of our strict count, and they are further from each other than either is from ours: German Wikipedia counts 12 over a stretch it gives as 14 km, and Cycling UK counts 26 over one it gives as 10 km. That is a factor of two on one road. Neither is wrong; they count different things and do not say what. The same thing happens on the Coll de Sóller, where three guides publish three different numbers for one pass.

How we got this Bearings every 5 m along the centreline; consecutive turns in the same direction accumulated into one bend; a bend ends after 25° of counter-turn.Computed from OpenStreetMap centreline (ODbL), and the source Cycling UK publishes.Computed 6 August 2026.

The loop gives the count an independent check, the only one of its kind on the island. OpenStreetMap maps the nus de sa corbata as a bridge on layer=2, the road passing over itself, but records no angle for it. Our bend count does not use that tag, and it still puts its single biggest turn of the whole climb in the same hundred metres: The Ma-2141 crosses over itself 9.46 km up the climb. The counter's nearest turn is 255° and its apex is 64 m away, counted as a hairpin.

How we got this Every edge of the derived path is checked for a bridge tag on layer 2 or above — the road over its own alignment. The apex of the nearest detected turn is compared with the crossing point. Nothing in the OpenStreetMap tags states an angle, so the two claims are independent.Computed from OpenStreetMap way 25073139, tagged bridge on layer 2, against our own bend detection on the same centreline.Computed 6 August 2026.

The full rule and this check are also on the twistiest roads on Mallorca.

Whether you can ride it, and what is changing

Source Consell de Mallorca · checked 6 August 2026

That was the emergency repair. The programme that follows it is the work you will feel through the bars. The Consell de Mallorca budgeted €3 million to renew the road surface completely and to fit new barriers and updated signage over the 13.3 kilometres from the Coll dels Reis down to the port of Sa Calobra, with work announced to start in September 2025.

Source Ultima Hora · checked 7 August 2026Reported 2 January 2025. The 13.3 km is the whole road; the climb we measure is the part from the port up to the top. The article states no completion date and says nothing about the 10-tonne limit.

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. If you ride here in 2026, expect roadworks on the Ma-2141, and on the Coll de Sóller, the other road named there.

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 states an intention and reports no progress, so nothing in it tells you how much of either road is done.

Cameras are also going in on this road. 210 cameras — 105 with number-plate readers and vehicle counting, 105 for surveillance — and 32 control zones in the Serra de Tramuntana, plus 20 sound meters distributed across the whole island, 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 6 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.

The part that matters for a cyclist is the counting: one stated purpose is to count the vehicles that enter, ahead of a vehicle-entry law that is still in parliament. The counting starts on the Lluc–Sa Calobra road.

Temperature at the top, and what the way down feels like

This descent ends at the water, and the only way home is back up through 708 m of it. In January the top of that road runs 5.9 °C colder than the sea you turned round at, so on this road you climb up into the cold at the end of the effort.

You finish this climb 708 m above where you started it, and it is colder up there. In January, the coldest month at this top, the foot of the climb averages 14.3 °C around 12:00 while the top averages 8.4 °C. That is a different set of clothes at each end: 5.9 °C bought with 708 m of climbing. In July the same top sits at 26.1 °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 — 5.4 °C standing still — feels like 0.6 °C at the slower speed and -0.8 °C at the faster one. Ride it at 12:00 instead and the same descent feels like 3.3 °C to 4.5 °C. Midday here is cold enough for wind chill to count in two months of the twelve. Whatever you would wear on the way up, the way down is the reason the gilet is in the pocket.

The temperatures are read by height between two thermometers 1,007 m apart, so a top on the north coast gets a figure measured elsewhere on the island. They are also open-sky readings: where the mountain shades the road, the morning will be colder than the table. What the temperatures do across the whole island, and what to put in the pocket, is on the kit guide.

How much traffic this road carries

The Ma-2141 is a dead end. It goes to the cove and nowhere else, so there is no through traffic on it at all: every vehicle in that count came here on purpose and has to leave the same way. Few roads on the island are like that, and it is why the figure is low for somewhere this famous.

All of this climb is on the Ma-2141, all 10.0 km of it. The Consell de Mallorca counts this road at a single point, which reads 1,511 motor vehicles a day. The road may be busy at one end and empty at the other, so treat a single counter as a rough guide to how busy it is.

Of the 16 roads the island's measured climbs run on, eleven carry more. It carries two of the climbs measured here, so that one figure is the traffic behind both. For the scale: the busiest of them, the Ma-15, counts 27,013 a day and the great mountain road through the Tramuntana, the Ma-10, counts 8,217.

A daily average smooths a whole year, so a February Tuesday and an August Sunday are one number here; ride early and you are riding under it. It counts motor vehicles only, so there is no count of cyclists. What these figures do to the risk per kilometre driven, road by road, is on the road-safety guide.

Getting there, and getting out

The Ma-2141 leaves the Ma-10 near Escorca and dead-ends at the cove. There is no loop, no alternative descent, and no road along the coast in either direction. Every rider who goes down either comes back up or leaves by sea, and every car and coach that goes down does the same thing on the same two lanes. That is why the island has been arguing about traffic on this road for a decade.

The other side of the pass is a different ride entirely: from Lluc it is 13.8 km at 1.8% for 248 m, because it runs almost the whole way on the Ma-10 and only switches onto the Ma-2141 at the end. Against the island median of 192 m, the haul out of the cove is a big climb — 2 of 75 — and it is the climb riders come here for.

If you are basing a trip around the Tramuntana rather than staying in it, a hire car is what makes the Serra reachable from Palma. If you would rather wake up near these roads, Sóller, Port de Sóller and Port de Pollença are the three towns in our where-to-stay guide within 50 km of the foot of Sa Calobra by road.

Verified Every figure on this page was re-checked against its source on 5 August 2026. Next review due within 120 days.