Descending Mallorca: the island's hardest climb is its sixth-hardest descent, and the hardest descent has no reputation at all

If you have a week here and you are choosing which mountains to ride, you have almost certainly chosen them off a list of climbs — this site publishes one, and it is a good list. It is also the wrong list for half of what you are about to do. Measured going down, the order barely survives contact: across the 13 descents a Mallorcan week actually gets built around, the ranking that orders them for climbing and the ranking that orders them for descending agree at 0.05, on a scale where 1 is the same order and 0 is no relationship whatsoever.

So here is the answer first. The descent to take on your first morning in the Serra is Coll de Femenia from Pollença — 6,833 metres between corners, not one of them tight enough to make you think about it, and the whole of the Tramuntana on your right. The one to leave until the last day is Coll d'Honor from Bunyola, which is 6th of 13 as a climb, first as a descent, and which almost nobody writes about. And Puig Major from Sóller is not the road you think it is in either direction.

The two orders

Thirteen roads, ranked twice. The climbing column is this site’s existing order — the Fiets index over our own measurement, the same one the hardest-climbs guide publishes. The descending column is new: 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.

Read the first two columns against each other and the disagreement is not subtle. 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. One publisher in our corpus mentions it in passing, in a sentence about somewhere else.

What is actually being measured

Three numbers, none of which this site has published before, and all three come out of 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 climb-sides 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. This is the join that did not exist: the bend list knew where the corners were and the elevation profile knew where the gradients were, and nothing had put them together. Every corner here now carries the average gradient of the 200 metres of road you descend to reach it.

The run between corners. Descending, the interesting distance is not summit-to-foot but corner-to-corner, because that is where the speed comes from and it is the number that 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 climb-sides, from road centrelines resampled at 5 m.Computed 8 August 2026.

Where the two combine

A tight corner is one thing. A tight corner at the bottom of a long, steep, uninterrupted run is a different thing, and until these two datasets were joined nothing on this site or anywhere else could point at 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 actually ride is the second: on Coll de Sóller from Sóller, 2,217 m between corners at 5.5%, ending at an 8-metre corner — the tightest on any major descent on this island, arriving 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, which is the useful contrast: what makes the Sóller one worth knowing about is not the distance on its own, it is the distance and the gradient and the radius together.

Sa Calobra, measured

It is the most photographed road in Mediterranean cycling and it is not the technical descent 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 place on Mallorca where the bend counter found one, and it arrives 547 m below the summit — which is to say, almost immediately. One publisher puts it at “around 500 m before you reach the summit”. Measured, 547 m. Somebody looked.

The reason to be careful here is in the corpus rather than in the geometry, and it is unanimous: 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.

The Coll de Sóller, both sides

The one road on the island where the descent is the point in either direction, and the two sides are genuinely different.

The Sóller side is the harder one and it is the one the tunnel took the traffic off. It is also the most specifically described road in the whole corpus: 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 rule that has nothing to do with theirs — comes out at 18 and 25. The same page puts the longest gap between hairpins at “just 500 meters”; measured, 534 m.

What the market says, tested

Every claim below is proved word for word against the publisher’s page as it stands today, and then answered by the measurement rather than repeated. 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 — that last group is not a scoreline and gets its own section.

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 25 August 2026.

Everything written into this survey answered it: 9 of 9 pages read. That is unusual on this site, and it is still not a claim to have read the field — the places riders talk to each other about descending, the review platforms and the big forums, publish nothing that can be quoted under this page’s rule that every claim stays checkable, word for word, against a live page. They are yours to read directly. What is below is the published trade, tested.

Two of them are worth reading twice. “Around 26 hairpin bends” is the most-repeated number in Mallorcan cycling — it appears in English on one page in this corpus and in German on another, and neither says what it counted. Under a stated rule the same road gives 15 hairpins and 28 corners of 90° or more, so twenty-six sits between the two: it is a number that has been repeated rather than made.

And one precise claim does not reproduce. 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. The page does not say which side, so both were counted: 10 corners on the Sóller side (7 of them hairpins) and 12 on the Bunyola side (11). On either reading and either definition it falls short.

What the geometry cannot see

6 of the 20 claims in this corpus are about things no road centreline contains, and every one of them is worth more to you on the day than the ranking above. They are here in full, attributed, because a guide that only prints what it can measure has quietly told you the rest does not matter.

Read them together and they make one list, which is the list to take with you:

• Shade and damp. Two publishers, independently, in two languages: the north-facing descents hold water long after the road in the sun has dried. The Sóller side of the Coll de Sóller and the drop to Orient are both named. This is a morning problem and a winter problem, and it does not show up in any number on this page.
• Width and what is coming up. The corpus is unanimous about Sa Calobra and about Formentor, and neither road’s width is in any layer here. On a dead-end road, everything that came down is coming back up.
• Coaches. Named by two publishers on Sa Calobra. Every account in this corpus that mentions timing says the same thing about the answer: go early.
• Your brakes. One publisher puts it plainly — “Check your brakes before the descent, especially on a rental bike.” The gap between a bike you know and a bike you collected yesterday is the one variable on this page that is entirely yours.

How wide is it, then

More claims in this corpus are about how narrow a road is than about anything else that can hurt you — it is said of Sa Calobra and of Formentor, in both languages, by publishers who agree about almost nothing else — and it is the one hazard none of them puts a number on. So on 15 August 2026 every one of the 6,091 mapped sections of the 238 numbered roads a bicycle may use on this island was read for a recorded width.

There is a width on 33 of them, and on the two roads everyone calls narrow there is none at all. That is the honest end of that question, and the claims stay in the table above where they were. What the map does hold is the lane count — known over 72.7% of the numbered network by the metre — and on a two-way road that answers the thing the word narrow is doing work for: whether two vehicles can pass without one of them putting a wheel off the asphalt. It is not 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 either road this corpus calls narrow, so no width figure is published for any road here.Computed from the same mapped sections, read for a recorded width.Computed 15 August 2026.

Read that way, the island answers with something nobody publishes: 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.

The Ma-1101 is the road, and almost nothing about it is famous. 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 are published here — 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 the metres it governs rather than by the number of sections carrying it; a single lane counts only where the road is two-way. Known for 72.7% of the network, and the unknown metres are published as unknown rather than filled in.Computed from 6,091 mapped sections of the 238 numbered roads a bicycle may use, with their own geometry.Computed 15 August 2026.

And the two famous roads, for completeness, because the comparison is the point:

So the two claims survive untouched and un-corroborated, and the honest reading of that is not that the publishers are wrong — it is that narrow on Sa Calobra means something the lane count is not measuring. 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, and the corpus is unanimous for a reason. What changes is where you would look for a road that is narrow by construction, and the answer is a pass most visitors never ride.

Before you go down

Where to base yourself for the descents rather than the climbs. The two sets are not in the same place, and that is the practical consequence of everything above. 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; this page is the reason that is not the same question.

The bike. The corpus’s one piece of equipment advice is about brakes on a hire bike, and it is the right one: a descent is the only part of a Mallorcan week where the machine matters more than the 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; the point is not which one you buy but that you check what the one you already have says about it before you leave.

The rest of the island

The table above is the thirteen. The full measurement covers 116 climb-sides 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 — which is its own kind of answer if what you want is a descent you can simply let run. 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.