Gravel cycling in Mallorca: where to ride, what is allowed

Where gravel riding on Mallorca is good: the flat interior

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

In practice it is broken up. The longest unbroken piece you can ride is 19.1 kilometres long, out by Betlem, and after that the dirt stops and you are back on tarmac. The network breaks into 8,348 separate pieces, and the median piece is 246 metres long, about the length of a farm entrance, which is what most of them are.

On Mallorca, gravel is for the Pla, the flat farmland in the middle of the island that road cyclists cross at speed with their heads down. The Serra de Tramuntana stays road-bike country. Expect mixed surface, linking stretches of dirt with quiet lanes, and base yourself in a town nobody sells cycling holidays in.

Access: most tracks do not say whether you may ride them

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

Of the 6,849.4 km of track, 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.

On four kilometres in five the map says nothing about access, and that does not mean you may ride them. This is the most useful thing to know before you plan: it is what turns a good route on paper into a turn-around at a chain across the track. It is also why every experienced rider here gives the same order of advice: local knowledge first, tyres second.

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

The map is silent for a reason. On Mallorca, whether you may ride a track depends on whether it is listed in a catalogue of public paths, and that is something a map cannot show.

Ley 13/2018, de 28 de diciembre, de caminos públicos y rutas senderistas de Mallorca y Menorca gives riders a right to pass, and names the bicycle explicitly:

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 and gave four years, so the deadline was 2022-12-30, 3.6 years ago. The register is still not finished. Until it is, “may I ride this track?” has a legal answer, but no map, ours included, can look it up.

The same article sets one clear limit, and it is the one riders most often get wrong:

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.

The twelve longest unbroken gravel sections on Mallorca

Next, continuity: how far the dirt goes before you are back on tarmac. This is where the island’s gravel reputation and the actual riding part company.

What counts for a gravel rider is how far the longest connected stretch goes. Leave out every paved road, and the rideable unpaved track 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 access to fields.

Here are the twelve that give the longest unbroken ride. That is a different list from the twelve with the most track in them.

The biggest single piece on Mallorca holds 64.8 km of track near sa Vall, but the longest ride across it is 10.9 km, and it does not make the top six of this table. It is a tangle of short field tracks with no long way through it.

The top of the table is camí dels Presos, out by Betlem: 19.1 km of unbroken dirt behind the Llevant coast (the east of the island), and the only piece on Mallorca long enough for a morning’s ride on its own.

Where to stay for gravel riding: inland towns

For every base town on this site, the table below gives two numbers: how much unpaved track lies within 10 km by road of the town centre, and the longest unbroken ride you can get on any one piece of it.

The longest-ride column is the one that matters, and it does not favour 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 threefold difference between towns whose road riding is much the same. Even the best of them gives less than two thirds of the ride the Llevant piece does.

Our base pages only cover towns with enough places to stay, and the towns that fall short are the farming towns in the middle of the island. That is exactly where the tracks are.

Felanitx has 386.0 km of track within ten kilometres of town, 2.2 times as much as the best base town. These towns are listed for the riding, and they are not recommendations as places to stay: none of them has enough accommodation to get a base page. Book one only once you have found somewhere you actually want to stay.

2 of the publishers quoted further down start their Mallorca gravel writing from the same town, and it is one of these: Café du Cycliste‘s route series starts in 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 tyres to bring, and what the map says about surface

Surface is the question everyone asks first, and the map answers it worst.

The map records a surface on only 17.9% of the network and a tracktype grade on 19.1%. Of the graded part, 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: loose ground, 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. In practice, nobody has recorded the ground on four fifths of the island’s tracks. Bring the tyre that copes with the worst surface you are willing to ride, and read any surface description in a route guide, ours included, as a report of the day somebody rode it.

Know before you ride

Plan for a closed gate. 83.8% of this network says nothing about access. The first time you ride a new section, ride it out and back instead of committing to a loop, and know the road route home.

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 about Mallorca gravel, checked against the map

The most accurate sentence anybody has written about Mallorca gravel was published in 2019, seven years before we measured the network, and the numbers bear it out:

Not even half or a third of the island’s hundreds of kilometres has been combined into fixed, connected loops. The numbers agree: 8,348 pieces, a median length of 246 m, and only 568 of them over two kilometres.

The same piece is just as 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.», meaning use GPX tracks or ride with somebody who knows the ground. The access figures above show why that advice matters.

GRAVEL Touren Magazin (MSV Medien) spent four days riding it in 2023 with a resident who has lived there fifteen years, and quotes him on what the dirt gives you: «»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». Without a public catalogue of paths, that is still how you find them.

Gravel riding here 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 clear about what kind of 140 km: «Zumal wir nicht von 140 Kilometern auf Mallorcas Straßen sprechen.». We do not know whether the event still runs, so treat the account as history.

That is 5 publishers, 3 of them German and 2 of them written by somebody who rode it. On gravel the German writing is the stronger half, which is the reverse of most topics on this site.

Hiring a gravel bike on Mallorca

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.».

We checked: 8 of the 16 hire shops on the island with a readable website list a gravel bike, 50.0%. That is better than “limited” suggests, and worse than road bikes, which essentially every shop lists. Of those 8, 3 mention a gravel bike only in a menu or a fleet list, and one only next to a price. Exactly 4 of the sixteen says anything about it in a full sentence, so expect to ask for the details yourself.

Book it before you fly, and say the word gravel in the first email. About half the shops do not list one, which makes getting a gravel bike in a given week a real constraint. First, compare hire bikes and their published specifications, then write to the two closest shops and ask what tyre width the frame takes and what tyres are actually fitted. Our bike hire guide covers the delivery and gearing questions that decide the rest of it.

Stay where the tracks are. The tables above put them in the interior, where this site has few base pages. 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 you and the bike 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 builds days from the same data as this guide, and how that data is collected is explained in one place.

How to read these numbers

Every figure on this page is measured over the same map of rideable roads the rest of the site uses. As a check, before anything here was calculated, all 3,904 published base-to-climb distances were recalculated on that map and had to match exactly.

Where the map has no data, we say so. The access figures show what the map declares, not what a landowner will do; the surface figures cover only the graded fifth of the network; and the walking paths are left out openly, with their count given above. Once the island’s own catalogue of public paths is finished, it will answer the access question better than any of this. The register the law describes is the thing to watch, and we will check this guide against it.