Hardest cycling climbs in Mallorca: all 75 ranked

Everyone comes to Mallorca for Sa Calobra, and everyone should. Ten kilometres fall away from the spine of the Serra to a cove you can only leave by climbing back out, laid so evenly by Antonio Parietti that the gentlest full kilometre and the steepest are barely two points apart. Ride it. It tops this ranking and it has earned the place.

Which climb for which day:

• Sa Calobra for the day you will still be describing in a year.
• Puig Major from Sóller for the biggest single climb Mallorca has — 848 m in one go.
• Sobremunt if you want to find out what you are actually capable of, and can accept a surface that will not flatter you. In the tables below it appears as coll de s'Heura from Son Serralta: our line up the same road, which rides 5,902 m of the carretera de Sobremunt and tops out lower.
• And if you have one morning and you are staying in Palma, ride up to Puig de sa Coma Fosca above Gènova. Its steepest kilometre is 15.6% — the steepest kilometre on the island, and steeper than anything on Sa Calobra, whose own worst kilometre ranks 13 of 75.

Sa Calobra is often called the hardest road on the island, and on our measurements it is: it comes first on the standard score and first again once every metre of climbing counts. The standard score, like most climb rankings, uses only the summit minus the start, and Mallorca’s roads dip and climb again. That sum leaves out 1,865 m of climbing across 62 of the 75 climbs ranked here (each side of a pass counts as its own climb). Count every metre the road goes up, and the climb that rises furthest in the ranking is our line up the carretera de Sobremunt, in the hills north-west of Palma: from 56 of 75 to 3. PJAMM Cycling ranks the Sobremunt road second on the island, above Sa Calobra, and Love Velo calls it “probably the toughest climb in Mallorca”.

The picks

The ranking uses the published FIETS index from the Dutch magazine Fiets: height gained multiplied by average gradient, so steepness counts for more than length, because on a bike it does. The seven picks are the top 6 on that index, the top 3 once every metre of climbing counts, and the top 2 by steepest kilometre. A climb that makes more than one of those lists is counted once.

Sa Calobra — the climb everyone should ride

10.0 km and 708 m at an average of 7.1%, and the index puts it first by a margin over everything on the island except Puig Major. What makes it unusual is that it has no ramps. Parietti laid the road to hold a near-constant gradient, and he managed it: its steepest kilometre ranks only 13 of 75 here, while its total is first.

Know this before you go: you descend it first. The Ma-2141 leaves the Ma-10 and drops to a cove with no onward road, so once you are at the bottom the climb is not optional, and there is no shortcut home. Budget the whole of it.

All 4 of the publishers we compared name it, as they do 3 of the other picks. Every famous climb is on every list; this one ranks first on the index. The full measurement, kilometre by kilometre.

Puig Major from Sóller — the biggest thing here

848 m gained in 15.4 km: 140 m more than Sa Calobra, and more than double the island median of 192 m. The gradient never frightens anybody — it averages 5.5% — and that is the trap. It does not stop, and the road tops out in a tunnel rather than at a view, so there is no summit café to ride towards.

Its hardest kilometre starts at km 12.9, at 7.2% — by then you have most of the climb behind you. The splits.

Sobremunt and the coll de s’Heura — the second-steepest kilometre on the island

Riders call it Sobremunt: the carretera de Sobremunt, in the hills north-west of Palma. The pick in our tables is coll de s'Heura from Son Serralta, which rides 5,902 m of that road but reaches it by a different line and tops out at 324 m. The Sobremunt climb other publishers measure tops out at 686 m. So it is the same road and two different climbs. Ours has the island’s second-steepest kilometre, at 14.1%, and it moves further up the ranking than any other climb once every metre of climbing counts: from 56 of 75 to 3.

The road has a reputation. PJAMM Cycling ranks the carretera de Sobremunt second of the 38 Mallorcan climbs it catalogues — above Sa Calobra. Love Velo, which does list it, calls it “probably the toughest climb in Mallorca”. Cycle Fiesta gives it 8.0% over 7.3 km and writes: “A climb of this profile would be more at home in Asturias or the Basque Country.” Epic Road Rides keeps a stand-alone guide to it and left it out of their ten-climb list. The specialist sites that measure it put it at the top; the popular lists that mention it put it sixth.

Source Cycle Fiesta · checked 7 August 2026

Source Epic Road Rides — John Maskell · checked 7 August 2026The article dates itself 24 April 2019.

Puig de sa Coma Fosca from Gènova — the steepest kilometre on Mallorca

15.6% from km 4.3, on a back road above Palma that none of the lists we compared names at all — 0 of 4. It is 5.3 km for 340 m, so it is a short outing: the hardest hour you can ride from a city-centre hotel. It is worth knowing about because the famous climbs are all an hour’s drive or a train ride away.

The other three

Know before you ride

None of this should stop you going; all of it changes what you pack or when you leave.

• Sa Calobra is a working tourist road. Love Velo, in its own words: “You need to be really careful on this route, especially in the summer months when the road can get really busy.” The coaches run to the cove and back all day; ride it early, or late enough that they have gone.
• You cannot bail out of Sa Calobra. There is no second road from the cove. Whatever you have left when you reach the sea, you are spending it on the way back up.
• Sobremunt’s top half is broken tarmac and loose gravel, per both publishers quoted above. The descent is the dangerous part, not the climb.
• Coll d’Honor has the worst surface of the classics — Love Velo calls its tarmac “probably the worst of all Mallorca’s climbs”.
• Puig Major ends in a tunnel, not at a view. There is no summit to stand on and no café to ride towards — the road goes straight through. Carry what you want to eat: the nearest food stop named by any of the café guides we checked is 3,761 m away by road, and on Coll dels Reis from Sa Calobra — the one everybody rides — it is 11,400 m. 5 of these 7 have no named stop within 1,500 m at all. What you eat on a climb like that is what you packed at home and trained on, which is the argument for real-food bars that go in the bike box rather than something bought on the way to the airport — nothing here has been tasted, and the cafés guide lists every stop these distances are counted from.
• On one of the seven, the bike you hire decides it. The lowest gears the island’s hire fleets publish run from 34×40 to 36×28. On six of these climbs, the average rider our gearing calculator assumes can keep the pedals turning in any of them; Sa Calobra is the exception, and it is the one everybody rides. The hire-bike gearing page has the operator-by-operator detail.

How we got this Road distance from the climb to the nearest place any of those sources names, measured along the roads and not as a straight line. A pick counts as served when that place is within 1500 m, the same radius the café guide uses. A climb with no named stop may still have somewhere to stop: the café guide lists what the map shows separately.Computed from the picks in this guide, against the cafés and other stops named by the café guide’s sources.Computed 8 August 2026.

Booking a bike for a week that includes any of these is the one decision in this guide that costs money: ask for the cassette before you pay, and if the operator will not say, assume the hardest gear in the table above. Compare hire bikes and their specifications.

How the ranking is made: the FIETS formula, why we use it, and the altitude bonus no Mallorcan climb gets

The ranking uses the FIETS index, published by the Dutch magazine Fiets: height gained multiplied by average gradient, or in the form everyone writes it, gain² ÷ (10 × length). Steepness counts for more than length, because on a bike it does.

We use somebody else’s formula because it is one we cannot tune. Every ranking on the site has to be computable from criteria published in advance and blind to anything commercial, and an index we neither designed nor can adjust is the surest way to meet that. No partner, hotel or other commercial interest has any say in which climbs appear. If you think the index weights the wrong things, reject it: the whole table is at the bottom of the page, with every figure the formula uses.

Source heuvelsfietsen.nl · checked 7 August 2026The same page argues the index is too coarse, on the ground that it averages a climb instead of reading it in segments. Because of that criticism, the steepest-kilometre ranking is given beside it as a separate list.

Which climbs other publishers' lists name, and which of theirs we do not measure

Four published surveys, all read on 7 August 2026. What they agree on is narrower than their lists suggest.

Which climbs the surveyed publishers name

Climb	Named by	Which
Coll dels Reis from Sa Calobra	4 of 4	PJAMM Cycling, Cycle Fiesta, Love Velo, Epic Road Rides
Puig Major from Sóller	4 of 4	PJAMM Cycling, Cycle Fiesta, Love Velo, Epic Road Rides
Coll de Sóller from Sóller	4 of 4	PJAMM Cycling, Cycle Fiesta, Love Velo, Epic Road Rides
Coll de sa Batalla from Caimari	4 of 4	PJAMM Cycling, Cycle Fiesta, Love Velo, Epic Road Rides
Coll d'Honor from Bunyola	3 of 4	Cycle Fiesta, Love Velo, Epic Road Rides
Puig de sa Coma Fosca from Gènova	0 of 4	none of them
coll de s'Heura from Son Serralta	0 of 4	none of them

How we got this Counted over the 4 published lists surveyed, not asserted. A climb counts as named when the publisher lists the same climb from the same village; where a publisher measures the same road to a different summit, the row is left unmatched rather than matched loosely.Computed from PJAMM Cycling, Cycle Fiesta, Love Velo, Epic Road Rides.Computed 7 August 2026.

The four surveys, and how much of each one this site has measured

Publisher	Article	Entries	We measure	We do not	Source
PJAMM Cycling	The Best Cycling Climbs in Mallorca	10	4	La Sobremunt, La Sobremunt (Esporles), Biniarroi, Port des Canonge + Col de Claret, Port de Valldemossa, Castell d'Alaró	PJAMM Cycling
Cycle Fiesta	Mallorca Cycling Climbs	9	8	Sobremunt	Cycle Fiesta
Love Velo	Best Cycling Climbs in Mallorca: 10 Iconic Ascents Ranked	10	6	Port Valldemossa, Coll de Randa, Sobremunt, Cap Formentor	Love Velo
Epic Road Rides	10 secret cycling climbs in Mallorca	10	7	San Salvador Monastery, Puig de Randa, Ermita de Betlem	Epic Road Rides

Entries are the rows each article publishes, which for a ranked catalogue is its published top ten rather than its whole database. Where a publisher's entry is a climb this site does not measure, the row is a pointer to them rather than a comparison with us. checked 7 August 2026.

The right-hand column shows which climbs we do not cover. PJAMM’s published top 10, out of the 38 Mallorcan climbs it catalogues, holds 4 climbs we measure. The other 6 — La Sobremunt, La Sobremunt (Esporles), Biniarroi, Port des Canonge + Col de Claret, Port de Valldemossa, Castell d'Alaró — are roads to look up on their pages rather than ours, and two of them are the Sobremunt lines described above. We include every named pass on a paved road, plus every named summit where a paved road dead-ends above 150 m. That rule is set out on the atlas, and the climbs in this column are the ones it leaves out.

Where other publishers' lengths and averages differ from ours, and why

The same climb, two publishers' numbers

Their entry	Publisher	The climb-side we measure	Theirs	Ours
Puig Major	Cycle Fiesta	Puig Major from Sóller	14.5 km at 5.9%	15.4 km at 5.5%
Sa Calobra	Cycle Fiesta	Coll dels Reis from Sa Calobra	10.3 km at 6.5%	10.0 km at 7.1%
Coll de Sa Batalla	Cycle Fiesta	Coll de sa Batalla from Caimari	7.8 km at 5.1%	8.4 km at 4.9%
Coll d'Honor	Cycle Fiesta	Coll d'Honor from Bunyola	6.1 km at 5.7%	6.1 km at 5.6%
Coll de Femenia	Cycle Fiesta	Coll de Femenia from Pollença	7.7 km at 5.5%	14.0 km at 3.5%
Coll de Soller	Cycle Fiesta	Coll de Sóller from Sóller	7.7 km at 5.7%	8.5 km at 5.5%
Coll d'Orient	Cycle Fiesta	Coll d'Orient from Alaró	5.1 km at 4.9%	7.0 km at 4.1%
Puig Major	Cycle Fiesta	Puig Major from Lluc	18.0 km at 1.6%	18.9 km at 2.1%
Coll d'Honor	Love Velo	Coll d'Honor from Bunyola	6.2 km	6.1 km at 5.6%
Coll de Sa Batalla	Love Velo	Coll de sa Batalla from Caimari	8.0 km at 5.0%	8.4 km at 4.9%
Coll de Femenia	Love Velo	Coll de Femenia from Pollença	7.5 km at 5.5%	14.0 km at 3.5%
Coll de Soller	Love Velo	Coll de Sóller from Sóller	7.4 km	8.5 km at 5.5%
Sa Calobra	Love Velo	Coll dels Reis from Sa Calobra	9.0 km	10.0 km at 7.1%
Sa Calobra (Coll dels Reis)	Epic Road Rides	Coll dels Reis from Sa Calobra	9.5 km	10.0 km at 7.1%
Coll de Soller	Epic Road Rides	Coll de Sóller from Sóller	5.0 km	8.5 km at 5.5%
Puig Major	Epic Road Rides	Puig Major from Sóller	14.0 km	15.4 km at 5.5%
Coll de sa Batalla	Epic Road Rides	Coll de sa Batalla from Caimari	8.0 km	8.4 km at 4.9%
Coll de Femenia	Epic Road Rides	Coll de Femenia from Pollença	19.0 km	14.0 km at 3.5%
Atalaya de Albercutx	Epic Road Rides	Talaia d'Albercutx from Port de Pollença	2.3 km	7.3 km at 5.0%
Coll d'Honor	Epic Road Rides	Coll d'Honor from Bunyola	5.4 km	6.1 km at 5.6%

How we got this Both figures as published, subtracted. Neither is corrected. A climb has no natural foot, so a publisher who starts in the village square and one who starts at the last house are measuring different stretches of road, and neither is wrong.Computed from 20 climbs where a surveyed publisher prints a length for a climb also measured here.Computed 7 August 2026.

Most of the differences run the same way: our length is the longer one in 16 of 20 pairs, by a median of 0.8 km. That is because we start a climb at the village its road leaves, and most publishers start it where the gradient begins. Read our figure as the whole ride out of the town and theirs as the climb proper, and almost every row above agrees.

The exception is Coll de Femenia. Love Velo gives 7.5 km where we measure 14.0 km, and two of the other three publishers also put it at 7.7 km, so here our figure is the odd one out. Ours starts in Pollença and includes the valley run-in, which is why the average falls to 3.5%. If you are pacing the climb rather than the ride, use their number.

This is why a ranking pieced together from different sources cannot fairly compare its own climbs: each source starts and stops them in different places. Every figure in the full table at the bottom was measured the same way for every climb. How we measure.

The climbs that move up when every metre of climbing counts

The left column ranks each climb on height gained, summit minus start, which is what every list, ours included, has used. The right column ranks it on the same index computed over every metre the road climbs.

The climbs a net-gain ranking cannot see

Climb	Rank on net gain	Rank on total ascent	Net gained	Actually climbed
coll de s'Heura from Son Serralta	56	3	222 m	512 m (+290 m)
Coll de sa Gramola from Estellencs	68	27	218 m	397 m (+179 m)
Coll dels Reis from Lluc	63	24	248 m	438 m (+190 m)
pas de l'Escala de l'amo en Joan Cerdà from Port de Pollença	75	41	133 m	362 m (+229 m)
Puig Major from Lluc	40	8	398 m	609 m (+211 m)
Coll de n'Esteve from Andratx	65	56	168 m	212 m (+44 m)

How we got this Net gain is the summit minus the lowest point on the road. Total ascent is every upward metre along the smoothed profile, so a road that drops and climbs again counts both. The difference is climbing you do that a summit-minus-foot figure leaves out.Computed from 75 published climbs, counting each direction up a pass separately, each with both a net height gain and a total ascent.Computed 7 August 2026.

PJAMM Cycling made this criticism before we measured it, and built its own index because of it: “FIETS overlooks the total elevation gained in a climb, only considering the difference in elevation.” Their Mallorca ranking differs from ours in exactly the way that sentence predicts. We already had both figures for every climb, so we can put a number on the difference: 1,865 m across 62 climbs, 11.0% of all the climbing across the climbs we publish.

Source PJAMM Cycling · checked 7 August 2026FIETS overlooks the total elevation gained in a climb, only considering the difference in elevation

Planning the days

The seven picks are not in one place, and that is the real planning problem on this island. They sort into 4 nearest base towns — Sóller (3), Palma (2), Platja de Muro (1), Valldemossa (1) — and only 2 of them start within two kilometres of the town that is nearest.

If you are building a week around the top of the ranking, base in the Sóller valley rather than on the bay: 2 of the seven start within two kilometres of it, and the third — Sa Calobra — is the ride out along the Ma-10 that everybody does anyway. Find a bed in Sóller.

The 2 picks nearest to Palma — Puig de sa Coma Fosca and coll de s'Heura — are the awkward ones from a mountain base, and none of the four surveyed publishers lists either of them as we measure them. Three of them do list the Sobremunt road, but to its higher summit. If you want them in the same week as the Serra, either split the week between two towns or compare car hire before prices move; a car turns both of them into a morning. Beds in Palma if you would rather ride to them from the door.

Every climb, ranked

The whole set, ordered by the index. Every figure the formula weighs is in the columns, so you can judge it by the number you care about.

Last verified 7 August 2026 — past its 60-day review window, so confirm the current status with the four surveyed publishers.

Every climb above has its own page with the per-kilometre splits and the gradient profile.