The hardest climbs in Mallorca, ranked — and the 1,865 m every other list leaves out

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.

It is also not the hardest road on this island, and the reason it keeps being called that is a habit in how climbs get scored rather than anything about the road.

Every ranking of climbs — the ones below, and this site’s own until this page — measures a climb as its summit minus its start. On Mallorca that arithmetic throws away 1,865 m of climbing, spread across 62 of the 75 climb-sides ranked here, because these roads dip. And the road it hides most is the carretera de Sobremunt, in the hills north-west of Palma — the climb PJAMM Cycling ranks second on the island, above Sa Calobra, and Love Velo calls “probably the toughest climb in Mallorca”. Our own numbers moved it from 56 of 75 to 3 the moment the sum counted every metre the road goes up.

So, the short answer, before the tables.

• 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, and nothing else here is close.
• Sobremunt if you want to find out what you are actually capable of, and can accept a surface that will not flatter you.
• 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.

How the ranking is made

The index is not ours. It is 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.

Using somebody else’s formula is the point. A ranking on this site has to be computable from criteria published in advance and blind to anything commercial, and the strongest version of that is an index we did not design and cannot tune. If you think it weights the wrong things, reject the formula — the whole table is below and it will re-sort under any rule you prefer.

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. That criticism is why the steepest-kilometre ranking is published beside it here rather than folded into it.

The picks

Seven climbs, and they are not chosen. They are the top 6 of the index, the top 3 once every metre of climbing counts, and the top 2 by steepest kilometre — three orderings, overlapping, deduplicated. Nothing in that rule can see a partner and no step of it is a judgement about a hotel.

Sa Calobra — the one to do, and it is not close

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 not a ramp — it is the absence of one. Parietti laid the road to hold a near-constant gradient and the measurement shows he managed it, which is why its steepest kilometre ranks only 13 of 75 here while its total is first.

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

All 4 of the surveyed publishers name it, as they do 3 of the other picks — universal coverage is what a famous climb has, and it is not what makes this one first. The full measurement, kilometre by kilometre.

Puig Major from Sóller — the biggest thing here

848 m gained in 15.4 km: half as much again as Sa Calobra, and more than double the island median of 192 m. The gradient never frightens anybody — it averages 5.5% — and that is exactly the trap. It simply 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 — the one the rankings disagree about

This is the pick that needs explaining, and the explanation is the most interesting thing on this page.

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.

So it is not unknown. What it is, is unranked: the specialist sources that measure it put it at the top and the popular lists that mention it put it sixth, and no ranking anywhere — ours until this page — could show you why those two facts belong together.

Our own inventory reaches that road by a different line — 5,902 m of the carretera de Sobremunt inside a climb-side that tops at 324 m where theirs tops at 686 m — so the two are not the same climb and we do not pretend otherwise. But the line we do measure carries the island’s second-steepest kilometre at 14.1%, and it is the single biggest mover in the whole table when the arithmetic changes.

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 no list in our survey names at all — 0 of 4. It is 5.3 km for 340 m, so it is not a day; it is the hardest hour available from a city-centre hotel, and the reason to know about it is that the famous climbs are all an hour’s drive or a train ride away.

The other three

Know before you ride

The candid part. None of this is a reason not to go; 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 simply goes through. Carry what you want to eat.
• On one of the seven, the bike you hire decides it. The island’s published hire fleets run from a lowest gear of 34×40 to 36×28. Six of these climbs the reference rider turns over in any of them; Sa Calobra is the exception, and it is the one everybody rides. The gearing survey has the operator-by-operator detail.

Booking a bike for a week that includes any of these is the one decision on this page 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.

What riders and publishers actually say

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

The most useful line in that table is the right-hand column. 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. Our inventory is queried rather than written down: every named pass on a paved road, plus every named summit a paved road dead-ends at above 150 m. That rule is published on the atlas, and this column is what it costs.

Where their figures and ours disagree

Counted rather than shrugged at, the disagreement has a direction: our length is the longer one in 16 of 20 pairings, by a median of 0.8 km. That is not a dispute about the road. This site anchors a climb at the village its road leaves; most publishers start where the gradient does. Read our figure as the whole ride out of the town and theirs as the climb proper, and almost every row above reconciles.

The row that does not is Coll de Femenia, and it is ours to explain. Love Velo prints 7.5 km where we measure 14.0 km — and two of the other three publishers put it at 7.7 km too, so on that one it is our figure that stands apart. 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.

That is exactly why a ranking assembled from mixed sources cannot be trusted to compare its own entries, and why every number in the table at the bottom of this page came off one script. How we measure.

The finding, in one table

Here is the substitution the whole page turns on. Left column: rank on height gained, which is what every list including ours has used. Right column: rank on the same index computed over every metre the road climbs.

We are not the first to notice. PJAMM Cycling published the criticism before we measured it, as their reason for building a different index: “FIETS overlooks the total elevation gained in a climb, only considering the difference in elevation.” Their Mallorca ranking disagrees with ours in exactly the way that sentence predicts, and because both numbers were already in our records, the disagreement turns out to be measurable rather than arguable — 1,865 m across 62 climb-sides, 11.0% of the island’s published climbing.

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 they are the two that no surveyed publisher names. 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. Sortable in the sense that it is already sorted; the column that matters to you may not be the first one.

Verified Every figure on this page was re-checked against its source on 7 August 2026. Next review due within 60 days.

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