The Ma-10 is the quietest road in Mallorca's crash register — and the flat road you cross to reach it is three and a half times worse

The verdict: ride the mountain, plan around the flat road

If you are nervous about the Serra, be nervous about the wrong thing. Over the two years Spain’s national casualty register currently publishes, the Ma-10 — the Tramuntana spine, 111 km of it, used by 29 of the island’s 122 measured climb-sides and carrying 128 km of measured climbing, five and a half times the next road on that list — collected 14 accidents with victims. That is 6.29 per 100 km of road per year, the lowest figure of any Mallorcan road with enough crashes to rank at all.

The road that comes out worst per kilometre of tarmac is the Ma-2200, the flat 20.5 km link joining the three towns the climb records put on it — Pollença, Port de Pollença, Sa Pobla. It is 3.5 times the Ma-10’s rate, and three people died on it in two years. It is also the road a rider based in Port de Pollença crosses twice a day on the way to somewhere more interesting.

That is the whole practical finding, and it changes one decision rather than none: the roads worth routing around on this island are the fast flat connectors between the towns, not the passes. Ride the mountain. Think about how you get to it.

One honest correction to that, worked out further down the page: the Ma-10’s rate is low partly because the Ma-10 is empty. Counting the traffic as well as the tarmac moves it from first to third of the eight. The advice holds — 8,217 vehicles a day against 19,985 on the flat link is exactly why you came — but the reason is the traffic, not a safer road.

Where the numbers come from, in one paragraph

Spain’s traffic authority publishes the national register itself rather than a summary of it: one row for every accident with victims in the country, carrying the province, the island, the road reference, the kilometre point, the month, the hour, what kind of accident it was and how many people were killed or hurt, counted at 30 days. Two years are published in this shape — 2023 and 2024 — which between them hold 203,302 rows for Spain and 2,830 for Mallorca.

The second half is the part nobody else has. A crash count on its own says a long road is dangerous; this site holds an OpenStreetMap measurement of every Ma- road on the island, so the count can be divided by the kilometres. That division is the table below. The Consell de Mallorca’s traffic counts, read from its 2024 map, then divide it a second way — by the kilometres actually driven — and that is the table after it.

The picks: eight roads with enough crashes to rank

Why the list is eight roads and not eighty-nine. 89 Mallorcan roads carry at least one accident with victims in the register, and most carry one or two. A rate built on two crashes is one bad afternoon with a decimal point on it, so the ranking takes only roads with at least 8 over the two years. The rest are in the record and are worth reading as counts, not as rates.

Three of the eight are roads a visiting cyclist meets constantly. The Ma-2200 is the Port de Pollença–sa Pobla link. The Ma-11 is the Palma–Sóller road through Bunyola, at 14.08 — better than the flat connectors, more than twice the Ma-10, and nobody was killed on it in either year. The Ma-15 is the Palma–Manacor–Artà axis, and its 21 accidents over 129 km work out at 8.13. Which of them a week puts you on is largely a question of where you sleep, and the regions guide is the map of that.

Once you count the cars, the order changes

A rate per kilometre of road treats an empty road and a busy one as the same road. They are not, and the Consell de Mallorca knows the difference: it counts the traffic at 169 stations on its own network and publishes the result once a year. Put those counts under the crash figures and the measure becomes accidents per hundred million kilometres actually driven — the number road engineers use, and one that appears not to have been published for this island’s roads before.

6 of the 8 ranked roads move. The Ma-15 — mid-table on tarmac — turns out to be the safest thing measured, at 0.82 per hundred million vehicle-kilometres against 3.15 for the Ma-3011. And the Ma-10 falls from first to third: 2.10 per hundred million, which is ordinary.

This does not send you onto the Ma-15, and here is why. The exposure-adjusted rate is a property of a road’s engineering — how often it hurts somebody per unit of driving. It is not a measure of what a bicycle meets on it. The Ma-15 earns its low rate while carrying 27,013 vehicles a day; the Ma-10 carries 8,217. The thing a rider actually experiences is the traffic column, not the rate column — and on that column the mountain wins by a factor of 3.3.

So the verdict at the top survives, with its reasoning corrected. The Ma-10 is not a road on which crashes are mysteriously rare. It is a road with 8,217 vehicles a day on it, which is why it feels the way it does, and the flat connector at Port de Pollença still carries 2.4 times that traffic and a worse rate on top.

The thing the headline number hides: a third of it is on roads you may not ride

This site measured, separately and earlier, which Mallorcan corridors are closed to bicycles — 138.9 km of carriageway across 5 road references, the motorway-standard roads radiating out of Palma. Put the casualty register beside that measurement and 36.7% of every open-road accident with victims on Mallorca falls on those 5 references, along with 21 of the 58 people killed on the island’s open roads.

Read that as a ceiling rather than a measurement. Those same numbers also carry ordinary road — the Ma-13 is motorway for 40 km and something you can legally ride for the rest — and the register’s kilometre point cannot be placed on the map precisely enough to split them. What is certain is the direction: a large share of what gets counted as road deaths in Mallorca happens on tarmac no bicycle is permitted to be on.

Know before you ride

The open road kills; the town hurts. 84.4% of Mallorca’s accidents with victims happen on streets and through-roads — 2,389 of 2,830. But 72.5% of the deaths happen out on the carretera: 58 against 22. Town crashes are frequent and survivable, open-road crashes are rare and not. The riding rule that falls out of it is the dull one — the kilometres that put you at risk of the worst outcome are the fast open ones, and they are the kilometres to be visible and predictable on.

Your months are not the island’s worst months. Open-road crashes peak in August and bottom out in January. February to May — the four months that hold almost every training camp on this island — carry 32.2% of the year’s open-road accidents between them, which is close to what four months of twelve would carry anyway. The island’s dangerous season is the one you are not here for.

Your hours are not the island’s worst hours either. The window almost every ride here occupies, 07:00 to 13:00, carries 27.4% of open-road accidents. The four hours from 17:00 carry 26.1% — almost as many, in four hours against six — and the single worst hour of the day is 18:00. If you are still out at dusk in October you are on the road at its worst, which is a good argument for the early start everybody recommends here for the heat and which turns out to be right twice over. The kit guide covers what the law requires you to be carrying when the light goes.

What actually happens, in the register’s own categories.

Rear-end and offset head-on collisions between vehicles dominate, which is what a road network of two-lane carreteras with slow traffic on it produces. Leaving the road accounts for the next largest block — the single-vehicle crash on a bend, which is the one a descending cyclist shares a mechanism with. The descending guide is about exactly that bend.

The cyclists, and why there is no cyclist column in the table above. Over the two years, 11 accidents on Mallorca killed a cyclist, 12 people in total — 8 out on the open road, 3 in town. Eleven is a list, not a distribution. Two of them fell on the same road in the same summer and it is tempting to read that as a pattern; the other year says otherwise, and no road reference in the list appears in more than one year. So the figure is published for the island and for nothing smaller, and no road on this page carries a cyclist risk rating, because none can be computed honestly.

What riders and drivers say, and what the register says back

Two claims about Mallorcan road safety circulate more than any others, and the register can be held up against both.

The first is about the Ma-2200, and it corroborates the measurement from the other direction. SeeMallorca’s route description of the road out of Port de Pollença, updated 18 September 2026, splits it exactly where the crashes are: the first five kilometres to the Pollença roundabout “can often be busy with traffic but the cycle path is very wide and traffic does not get too close”, and then, “once past the last entrance/exit to Pollenca the traffic on the road changes to a much faster and busier road, and the road surface for cyclists deteriorates somewhat.” It goes on: “There is no longer a wide cycle path here and cars will pass very fast beside you.” A rider wrote that from the saddle and the national register agrees with them in a completely different unit.

The second cuts the other way. In May 2026 ACTUA, Mallorca’s coach drivers’ association, told local media that “every day, hordes of cyclists speed down a narrow road with no shoulder or occupy the centre of the road, blocking buses and causing accidents” — naming the road between Coll de sa Batalla and Sa Calobra specifically. Those are the Ma-2130 and the Ma-2141, and over two years the register records 5 and 2 accidents with victims on them, with 0 deaths on the Sa Calobra road.

Both things can be true and the register only settles one of them. It counts accidents in which somebody was hurt. It cannot count a near miss, a coach that could not get past, or a driver arriving at work angry, and those are what the complaint is actually about. What it can say is that the stretch named as the island’s worst for cyclist behaviour is not producing casualties at a rate any other Mallorcan road would envy — it is producing them at one of the lowest rates measured here.

If you are planning this now

Where you sleep decides which of these roads you meet. A base in Port de Pollença or Alcúdia puts the Ma-2200 between you and the mountains most mornings; a base at the foot of the Serra does not. That is a real trade against everything else those towns have going for them, and the base-town guide weighs the rest of it. If the northern bases win on the other grounds — and for most first trips they do — beds in Port de Pollença and in Alcúdia are the starting point, and the answer to the road is to cross it early rather than to avoid the town.

Two routing habits worth forming. Cross the flat connectors, do not ride along them: the Ma-2200 and the Ma-12 are roads to be on for four kilometres, not forty, and the regions guide has the lanes that parallel them. And take the early start seriously — it is the same advice the heat gives you, and the hour data says it twice.

If it goes wrong anyway, the emergency guide has the number that connects without your network, the four hospitals and how far each one is from where you were riding.

The full table

Every Mallorcan road the register places an accident on and this site has measured the length of, including those below the ranking floor. Counts are two-year totals; the rate is per 100 km of road per year and is worth very little under about 8 accidents.

How we got this Accidents with victims on the reference over 2 years, divided by the length of every way carrying that reference in OpenStreetMap, expressed per 100 km of road per year. Only references with at least 8 accidents are ranked. References carrying a motorway carriageway are excluded entirely, because the measured length does not include it and would make the rate several times too high.Computed from Spanish national casualty register (DGT), 2023 and 2024, filtered to Mallorca; road lengths from OpenStreetMap.Computed 19 September 2026.

Verified Every figure on this page was re-checked against its source on 19 September 2026. Next review due within 180 days.

How we got this Accidents with victims on the reference over 2 years, divided by vehicle-kilometres: the mean of the Consell de Mallorca counting stations on that reference, multiplied by 730 days and by the length of the road, expressed per 100 million vehicle-kilometres. The road each station sits on is read from the station's own map label, never from the nearest road on the map.Computed from Intensitat Mitjana Diària de Vehicles 2024, Consell de Mallorca — the traffic counts behind the vehicle-kilometre rates.Computed 20 September 2026.

Verified Every figure on this page was re-checked against its source on 20 September 2026. Next review due within 180 days.