Gravel in Mallorca: 6,849 km of dirt, and 19 of it in a row

Bring the gravel bike for the interior, not for the mountains

Mallorca has more dirt than almost anyone riding it realises: 6,849.4 kilometres of track a gravel bike belongs on, against a road network the whole world flies here for. On a map it looks like a second island hiding under the first one.

It is not. The longest unbroken piece of it you can ride is 19.1 kilometres long, out by Betlem, and after that the dirt stops and you are on tarmac again. The network breaks into 8,348 separate pieces, and the middle one is 246 metres — the length of a farm entrance, because that is what most of them are.

So the honest verdict is a narrow one, and it is a good one. Gravel here is not an alternative to the Serra de Tramuntana; it is an alternative to the Pla — the flat agricultural middle of the island that road cyclists cross at speed with their heads down. Ride it as mixed surface, expect to stitch dirt with lanes, and base yourself somewhere nobody sells cycling holidays.

The map does not know whether you may ride it

Start with permission, because it is the constraint everything else sits underneath. Mallorca’s interior is fincas, and a finca has a gate.

Of the 6,849.4 km measured, the map declares 865.8 km closed and 245.8 km open. Everything else — 5,737.9 km, 83.8% of the network — carries no access tag of any kind.

Four kilometres in five are silent, and silence is not permission. That is the single most useful thing on this page, because it is what turns a beautiful planned route into a turn-around at a chain across a track — and it is why every experienced rider here gives the same advice about local knowledge before they give any advice about tyres.

There is a law about this, and it ran out of time in 2022

The silence is not a mapping failure. It is the shape of the underlying question, because on Mallorca the answer is not carried by the track — it is carried by a catalogue.

Ley 13/2018, de 28 de diciembre, de caminos públicos y rutas senderistas de Mallorca y Menorca gives the answer a rider wants, and names the bicycle to do it:

On a public path, then, riding is a general right, free, and cannot be charged for. The catch is in the word public. The same law orders every municipality to work out which of its paths those are and publish a catalogue — «Los ayuntamientos aprobarán sus catálogos en el plazo máximo de cuatro años desde la entrada en vigor de esta ley.» — and to feed the results into an island register that anybody could consult: «El Registro insular de caminos públicos es un registro informativo de los caminos públicos de la isla y puede ser contradicho ante los tribunales.»

The law entered into force on 2018-12-30. Four years puts the deadline at 2022-12-30, which is 3.6 years ago, and the register is not finished. Until it is, the question “may I ride this track” has a correct legal answer that no map, ours included, can look up.

One limit the same article is explicit about, and it is the one riders trip over:

The right runs along the path. It does not run across the field beside it, and it does not turn a farm track into a public one because a mapper drew it.

Source Agencia Estatal Boletín Oficial del Estado — Ley 13/2018, art. 30.1 · checked 8 August 2026Consolidated text, BOE-A-2019-995. Published in «BOIB» núm. 163, de 29/12/2018, «BOE» núm. 24, de 28/01/2019. In force from 2018-12-30.

Twelve pieces of dirt, and how far each one actually goes

Now continuity, which is where the island’s reputation and its reality part company.

A gravel network is not its total length; it is the length of its longest connected run. Measured as a graph in which tarmac does not exist, the ridable unpaved breaks into 8,348 pieces. Only 568 of them are at least 2 km long, and those 568 hold 3,129.8 km — a bit over half the network. The rest is field access.

Here are the twelve that give the longest ride — which is a different list from the twelve with the most track in them, and the difference is the whole point.

Read the two length columns against each other and the island’s gravel is explained in one line. The single biggest piece on Mallorca holds 64.8 km of track near sa Vall — and lets you ride 10.9 km across it. It does not make the top six of this table. It is a lattice of field tracks, not a road.

The one that does top it is camí dels Presos, out by Betlem — the 19.1 km behind the Llevant coast, and the only piece of dirt on this island that is a morning’s riding on its own.

The dirt is where the beds are not

Every base town on this site has now been asked the same two questions: how much unpaved is within 10 km by road of the middle of town, and how far can you ride on any single piece of it.

Read the span column, not the total, and it is unkind to the famous names. Sóller tops it at 11.3 km — the camí de sa Costera piece — and Port de Pollença, the most-booked cycling base on the island, comes last at 3.5 km: a three-fold spread across towns whose road riding is broadly comparable. And the best of them is still under two thirds of what the Llevant gives you, which is the next table’s point.

The base cluster only publishes towns that clear a lodging floor, and the towns that fail it are the agricultural ones in the middle of the island — which is exactly where the tracks are.

Felanitx carries 386.0 km of track inside ten kilometres of town — 2.2 times the best published base. These towns are in this table because they are where the riding is, not because they are recommendations: none of them clears the accommodation floor the base pages use, so book one only after you have found somewhere you actually want to stay.

2 of the publishers quoted further down start their Mallorcan gravel writing from the same town, and it is one of these: Café du Cycliste‘s route series runs out of Sineu, and the island’s first gravel event set off from the velodrome there. Sineu is second in this table and has no base page on this site — which is the whole finding in one coincidence.

What tyre, and what the map will not tell you

Surface is the question everyone asks first and it is the one the data answers worst — deliberately reported that way rather than filled in.

The map declares an explicit surface on only 17.9% of the network and a tracktype grade on 19.1%. Of the graded portion, 1,086.5 km is grade 1–3 — firm enough that a 38 mm tyre is plenty — and 221.6 km is grade 4–5, which is loose, and where a gravel bike stops being the right tool.

Where a surface is named, gravel leads it at 457.2 km, followed by unpaved at 194.3 km. Take the practical reading rather than the table: on four fifths of the island’s tracks nobody has recorded the ground, so bring the tyre that copes with the worst thing you are willing to meet, and treat any surface promise in a route description — ours included — as a description of the day somebody rode it.

Know before you ride

The gate is the hazard, not the gradient. 83.8% of this network says nothing about access. Plan an out-and-back rather than a committing loop the first time you use a new sector, and carry the road option in your head.

10,907 ways and 3,119.3 km of unpaved path are excluded from every figure here, because they are walking trails with no bicycle permission in the map. That is most of the Serra’s famous stone-paved routes. If you have seen a Mallorca gravel photo of a dry-stone staircase, that is a hiking path, and riding it is both antisocial and slow.

The GR-221 is not a gravel route. The island’s one long-distance off-tarmac corridor — 234.9 km of it mapped across 16 route relations, of which 154.9 km is unpaved — declares a bicycle rule on almost none of itself: 1.4 km explicitly closed to bicycles, 12.5 km explicitly open, and 220.9 km (94.1%) silent. It is signposted, waymarked and walked hard in season. Treat it as a footpath that occasionally coincides with a track you may ride.

Hike-a-bike is normal here and the route notes usually say so. Café du Cycliste’s own description of one popular loop: «The ride begins with smooth gravel but becomes rougher and rougher as it hits the foothills of the mountains. There will be hike-a-bike.»

513 ways tagged track on this island are asphalt — 199.7 km of them — and they are excluded here. A track in Mallorca is as likely to be a concreted lane to a house as a gravel road, which is a good thing to know when a planner routes you down one.

What riders say, and whether it holds

The best sentence anybody has written about Mallorcan gravel was published in 2019, seven years before this measurement existed, and it turns out to be right:

Not even half or a third of the island’s hundreds of kilometres has been combined into fixed, connected loops. Measured: 8,348 pieces, median 246 m, 568 of them over two kilometres. The magazine reached from the saddle what the graph reaches from the data.

The same piece is equally clear about what to do with a network like that: «Um sich nicht in den wildbewachsenen Weiten zu verlieren, ist es sinnvoll, GPX-Touren oder die Hilfe von ortskundigen Guides zu nutzen.» — use GPX tracks or somebody who knows the ground. Our permission column says why that is not laziness.

GRAVEL Touren Magazin (MSV Medien) spent four days riding it in 2023 with a resident who has been there fifteen years, and quotes him on what the dirt buys: «»Beim Graveln kommst du an Orte, die du mit dem Rennrad nie erreichen würdest«» — places you would never reach on a road bike. He found them, the piece says, by trial and error: «Die besten Gravelstrecken kundschaf-te er nach der Trial-and-Error-Methode aus». That is what a missing catalogue costs a rider, expressed as a hobby.

And it is not new. The island’s first gravel event ran out of the velodrome at Sineu, reported first-hand by Bike-X in 2019: «Zum "Toros de Gravel", Mallorcas wohl erstem Event dieser Art. Gestartet wird am Velodrom von Sineu in klassischer RTF-Manier.» — over 140 km, and the writer is careful about what kind of 140 km: «Zumal wir nicht von 140 Kilometern auf Mallorcas Straßen sprechen.». Whether that event still runs is not something this page can tell you; the account is dated and read as history.

This is 5 publishers, 3 of them German and 2 of them written by somebody who rode it. The German half is the stronger one here, which is the reverse of the usual position on this site and worth saying plainly.

Getting a bike under you

A gravel bike is the one category the island’s hire trade is thin on, and the specialists say so. Mallorca Gravel: «Since the supply of gravel bikes available to rent in Mallorca is limited, we recommend making arrangements prior to visiting the island.» — and the seasonal half of it, «If you are visiting between November and April, choices to rent a gravel bike in Mallorca may be even more limited.».

Tested against the field: 8 of the 16 readable hire fleets on this island publish a gravel bike — 50.0%, which is better than “limited” suggests and worse than the road fleet, where essentially everybody publishes. More telling than the count: of those 8, 6 name a gravel bike only in a menu or a fleet list and one only beside a price. Exactly 1 of the sixteen says anything about it in a sentence — which is what a category looks like before a trade takes it seriously.

Book it before you fly, and say the word gravel in the first email. Because half the field does not publish one, availability in a given week is a real constraint rather than a formality — compare hire bikes and their published specifications first, then write to the two closest and ask what tyre width the frame takes and what is actually on it. Our bike hire guide covers the delivery and gearing questions that decide the rest of it.

Stay where the tracks are. The measurement above says that is the interior, and the interior is where the base pages thin out — Artà and Manacor sit at the top of the dirt table, and Port de Pollença is the classic road base that comes bottom of it. Pick according to which bike you are bringing.

Getting yourself and it there. If the gravel bike is coming with you rather than being hired, a transfer that takes a bike box is the part people forget, and our arrival guide has the two regulations that decide what carries a bike from the airport. If you would rather have the car, compare car hire before the spring weeks fill.

Building the week around it. The trip planner composes days from the same records this page is measured from, and how those records are made is written down in one place.

How to read these numbers

Every figure on this page is measured over the same ridable road graph the rest of this site uses, and the measurement proves itself against it: before anything here was computed, all 3,904 published base-to-climb distances were recomputed over the graph and had to agree exactly.

A gap in the tagging is reported as a gap. The permission split is what the map declares, not what a landowner will do; the surface split covers the fifth of the network that is graded; and the walking paths are excluded by name rather than quietly. Where the island’s own catalogue of public paths is finished, it will be a better answer than any of this — the register the law describes is the thing to watch, and this page will be re-read against it.