Mallorca's hardest descents, ranked against the climbs

If you have a week here and you are choosing which mountains to ride, you almost certainly chose them off a list of climbs. That list covers only half of what you are about to do, because every road you ride up you will also ride down, and going down the order changes almost completely. Across the 13 descents a Mallorcan week usually gets built around, the ranking for climbing and the ranking for descending agree at 0.05, on a scale where 1 is the same order and 0 is no relationship at all.

Take Coll de Femenia from Pollença on your first morning in the Serra. It gives you 6,833 metres between corners, none of them tight enough to make you think about it, and the whole of the Tramuntana on your right. Leave Coll d'Honor from Bunyola until the last day. It is 6th of 13 as a climb and first as a descent, and almost nobody writes about it. And Puig Major from Sóller rides very differently going down from the way it rides going up.

Hardest descents in Mallorca, ranked against the climbs

Thirteen roads, ranked twice. The climbing column is the Fiets index, the same order the hardest-climbs guide uses. The descending column ranks how tight the corners are, and how fast you arrive at them, per kilometre of road.

How we got this Each corner contributes min(20/r, 4), scaled by (1 + approach% / 8); the sum is divided by the length of the descent. Nothing is fitted and no term is commercial.Computed from every corner’s radius and approach gradient on descents of at least 2 km.Computed 8 August 2026.

The two rankings disagree sharply. Puig Major from Sóller is the 2nd climb on the island and the 12th descent of 13: 20 corners in 15.4 km, not one of them at or under 15 metres, a median radius of 85 m against 45 m for the island’s corners as a whole. It is the second-hardest thing you can ride up here and one of the easiest things you can ride down.

Coll d'Honor from Bunyola goes the other way. It is the 6th climb and the hardest descent measured on Mallorca: 8 of its 19 corners are at or under 15 metres, in 6.1 km, at a median radius of 21 m — the tightest median of any major descent here. Of the published guides quoted below, only one mentions it, in passing, in a sentence about somewhere else.

Corner radius, approach gradient and the run between corners

Three numbers, all taken from the same road centreline the climbs are measured along.

Radius. A hairpin count tells you a road turns back on itself; it does not tell you whether that happens over twelve metres or ninety. Arc length divided by heading change gives the radius, and radius is what decides a corner. Across 917 corners on 116 climbs, counting each direction up a pass separately, the median is 45 m, the tightest is 6 m, and only 92 — 10% of them — are at or under 15 m.

The gradient above the corner. Every corner here carries the average gradient of the 200 metres of road you descend to reach it, which is what decides how fast you arrive.

The run between corners. Descending, the distance that matters is the one from corner to corner. That is where the speed comes from, and it decides what the next corner costs.

How we got this Arc length divided by total heading change in radians. A corner is a run of same-direction turning of at least 90°, under the counting rule published on the hairpins page.Computed from 917 corners on 116 climbs (each direction up a pass counted separately), from road centrelines resampled at 5 m.Computed 8 August 2026.

Long straights that end in a tight corner

A tight corner on its own is one problem. A tight corner at the bottom of a long, steep, uninterrupted run is a bigger one. Island-wide there are 14 — a run of at least 400 m ending at a corner of 15 m or tighter — spread over 13 descents.

The one on that list you are most likely to ride is the second. On Coll de Sóller from Sóller it is 2,217 m between corners at 5.5%, ending at an 8-metre corner. That is the tightest corner on any major descent on the island, and you reach it after more than two kilometres of road that has asked nothing of you. The longest run-in of all is on a minor road behind Son Servera, and it is nearly flat. The Sóller one matters because it combines the distance, the gradient and the radius.

Descending Sa Calobra

It is the most photographed road in Mediterranean cycling, and as a descent it is less technical than its reputation suggests. 28 corners of 90° or more, 15 of them hairpins under a published rule — and exactly 1 at or under 15 metres, against 8 on the Coll d’Honor. The median corner here has a 35-metre radius. It is 6th of 13 going down and first going up.

What it does have is the 255° knot where the road crosses over itself, the only one on any measured road on the island, and you reach it 547 m below the summit, almost as soon as you set off. One publisher puts it “around 500 m before you reach the summit”; the measured figure is 547 m.

The reason to be careful here is the traffic and the width, and every published account agrees on it: the road is narrow, it is a dead end, and everything that comes down it has to go back up it. See what the geometry cannot see below.

Descending the Coll de Sóller, both sides

This is the one road on the island where the descent is worth riding for its own sake in either direction, and the two sides are very different.

The Sóller side is the harder one, and it is the one the tunnel took the traffic off. It is also the road the published guides describe most precisely: one operator writes that the southern ascent “offers 20 tight bends while the north side has almost 30 hairpins”, and our own count, made under a separate rule, comes out at 18 and 25. The same page puts the longest gap between hairpins at “just 500 meters”; measured, it is 534 m.

What other guides say about these descents, checked

Here are the published claims about these descents, each quoted word for word from the publisher’s page and set against the measurement. 9 publishers, 20 claims, 1 of the publishers writing in German. 11 hold, 3 come out differently, and 6 are about things no road geometry contains. Those last ones get their own section below.

How we got this a statement about one road this site measures, made by a publisher in the survey, written as a pattern that proves itself verbatim against the live page at every re-checkComputed from a page about riding down a Mallorcan road rather than up it, naming at least one road, readable without an account, a paywall or a CAPTCHA.Computed 3 October 2026.

9 of 9 publisher pages are quoted here. The forums and review sites where riders compare notes on descending are not in this table; read them yourself before you go.

“Around 26 hairpin bends” is the most-repeated number in Mallorcan cycling. It appears in English on one page quoted here and in German on another, and neither says what it counted. Counted under a stated rule, the same road has 15 hairpins and 28 corners of 90° or more. Twenty-six sits between the two, and it looks like a number copied from page to page rather than counted.

One precise claim does not match the road. The same operator page that gets the two sides of the Coll de Sóller right says there are sixteen switchbacks between kilometre four and six. It does not say which side. The Sóller side has 10 corners there (7 of them hairpins) and the Bunyola side has 12 (11). On either side, by either definition, there are fewer than sixteen.

What the geometry cannot see

6 of the 20 published claims are about things no road centreline contains, and on the day every one of them matters more to you than the ranking above. They are all here, with their sources.

Together they make the checklist to take with you:

• Shade and damp. Two publishers, independently and in two languages, say the north-facing descents hold water long after the road in the sun has dried. They name the Sóller side of the Coll de Sóller and the drop to Orient. Expect it in the morning and in winter; none of the numbers above will warn you.
• Width and what is coming up. Every published account calls Sa Calobra and Formentor narrow, and neither road has a recorded width (more on that below). On a dead-end road, everything that came down is coming back up.
• Coaches. Two publishers warn about them on Sa Calobra. Every account that mentions timing gives the same advice: go early.
• Your brakes. One publisher puts it plainly: “Check your brakes before the descent, especially on a rental bike.” Of everything on this list, the bike is the one thing you control, and a bike you collected yesterday needs checking before you trust it downhill.

How narrow the roads are: width and lane count

Narrowness is the hazard the published guides mention more than any other. They say it of Sa Calobra and of Formentor, in both languages, and they agree on little else, yet none of them puts a number on it. As of 15 August 2026, the 238 numbered roads a bicycle may use on this island are mapped in 6,091 sections.

33 of those sections have a recorded width, and the two roads everyone calls narrow have none at all. So the narrowness claims stay in the table above, neither confirmed nor contradicted. What the map does hold is the lane count, known over 72.7% of the numbered network by length. On a two-way road that answers what narrow usually means to a rider: whether two vehicles can pass without one of them putting a wheel off the asphalt. A lane count is not a width. A generous single lane is wider than two mean ones, and the two are never mixed below.

How we got this width is recorded on 33 of 6,091 of them (0.5%) and on none of the sections of the two roads that publishers call narrow, so we give no width figure for any road.Computed from the same mapped sections, read for a recorded width.Computed 15 August 2026.

By lane count, the numbered network is very nearly all two-lane. 9.9 km of the 1,347.5 km whose lane count is known carries a single two-way lane — 0.7% of it. And 88.1% of that sits on one road.

That one road is the Ma-1101, and it is not a famous one. It climbs from Puigpunyent over the Coll des Grau and drops into Esporles, in the quiet southern end of the Tramuntana, and the map gives it a single two-way lane for 96.5% of the 9.0 km it is confident about. Cycle Fiesta, writing about the climb rather than the descent, says the same thing without a number: “The road surface is in very good condition, but it is narrow and care should be taken, particularly on the tight hairping bends.” The Consell de Mallorca signposts a cycling route along it. Both sides have their own climb pages, Coll des Grau from Puigpunyent and Coll des Grau from Esporles, and the Esporles side is single-lane over 95.6% of its own length, on a stretch the map is confident about along 99.9% of it.

How we got this each section’s lane count weighted by its length in metres; a single lane counts only where the road is two-way. Known for 72.7% of the network. The remaining metres are shown as unknown.Computed from 6,091 mapped sections of the 238 numbered roads a bicycle may use, with their own geometry.Computed 15 August 2026.

Here are the two famous roads, for comparison:

So neither claim is confirmed or contradicted, and that does not make the publishers wrong. On Sa Calobra, narrow means something a lane count does not measure. A two-lane road with a coach on it and a wall on one side is narrow in every way that matters at forty kilometres an hour, which is why every account says so. If you are looking for a road that is built narrow, it is the Coll des Grau, a pass most visitors never ride.

Before you descend: where to stay, your bike, your insurance

Where to base yourself for the descents rather than the climbs. The technical descents and the fast ones are in different parts of the island. The top 3 on the tightness order are two passes — Coll d'Honor and Coll de Sóller, the second counted from both sides — and they sit within a few kilometres of each other in the Bunyola–Orient–Sóller corner of the Serra, on the Ma-2100, the Ma-2020 and the old Ma-11A. That makes Sóller and Palma the two bases that reach all of them without a transfer day. The top 3 on the speed order — Coll de Femenia and Puig Major, the second again from both sides — are all on the Ma-10, the high road between Sóller and Pollença, which means one road links them and Pollença puts you on its northern end. Our base guide ranks every town on the climbing, and the best base for the descents can be a different town.

The bike. The one piece of equipment advice in the published guides is to check the brakes on a hire bike, and it is the right one: a descent is the only part of a Mallorcan week where the bike matters more than your legs. If you are renting, it is worth seeing what the operators actually stock before you arrive rather than at the counter — our hire guide has what the island’s operators publish about their fleets, and what they leave out.

Cover. A descent is where the risk on a cycling holiday actually sits, and standard travel policies routinely exclude exactly this: many treat road cycling as a sports activity requiring a declaration, and medical repatriation from a mountain road is not a line most people have read in their own policy. EKTA is one provider that sells cover with cycling included. Whichever you use, check what the policy you already have says about cycling before you leave.

The rest of the island

The table at the top covers the thirteen main descents. The full measurement covers 116 climbs and 536 kilometres of road, of which 86 are long enough to carry a per-kilometre ranking, 18 are measured and too short for one to mean anything, and 12 carry no corner of 90° at all, so if you want a descent you can let run, start with those. Across all 86 ranked descents the two orders agree at 0.30, a little more than over the thirteen and still not much. The corner-by-corner counts, including every hairpin on the island, are on the hairpins page.