Road safety for cyclists in Mallorca: crash rates by road

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

If the Serra makes you nervous, the numbers point at the flat roads instead. 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 climbs (counting each direction up a pass separately) 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.

In practice, the roads worth routing around on this island are the fast flat connectors between the towns, not the passes. Ride the mountain, and plan how you get to it.

One correction to that, explained further down: 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 still holds, because 8,217 vehicles a day against 19,985 on the flat link is exactly why you came. The reason is the lighter traffic, not a safer road.

Where the crash and traffic numbers come from

Spain’s traffic authority publishes the full national register, not just a summary: 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.

A crash count on its own makes a long road look dangerous. Every Ma- road on the island has been measured on OpenStreetMap, so the count can be divided by the kilometres, and that gives the table below. The Consell de Mallorca’s traffic counts from its 2024 map divide it a second way, by the kilometres actually driven, and that gives the table after it.

The eight roads with enough crashes to rank

Why only eight roads are ranked. 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 full table at the bottom; read them 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 alike. The Consell de Mallorca 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.

6 of the 8 ranked roads move. The Ma-15, mid-table on tarmac, comes out as the safest road on this measure, 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, an ordinary figure.

This does not send you onto the Ma-15. The exposure-adjusted rate describes a road’s engineering: how often it hurts somebody per unit of driving. It does not tell you 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. What a rider actually feels is the traffic column, and on that column the mountain wins by a factor of 3.3.

So the advice at the top stands, for a corrected reason. Crashes on the Ma-10 are rare because it carries only 8,217 vehicles a day, which is also 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.

Why most climb roads have no traffic count

A traffic-based rate needs a traffic count, and there is only a count where the Consell puts a counter. Whether a road gets one depends mostly on its length.

You might expect road class to decide it, with trunk roads getting counters and lanes not, but most of that effect is length, because the lower classes hold the shorter roads. Hold one constant and vary the other: across the classes, at a given length, coverage moves about 23 points. Across the lengths, within a given class, it moves 87 — and it runs nearly the whole way inside every class, primary roads included. In one band the class ordering even inverts, with the 12–25 km tertiary roads counted more often than the secondary ones. So class matters, but less than length does. A counting station is a point on a road, and a road that is 2 km long is a small part of anybody’s network.

That puts the climbs at the short, uncounted end. Of the 34 roads the published climbs are on, 13 carry no counter at all, and they are the short ones: a median of 4.6 km against 11.4 km for the counted ones. That leaves 16 climbs with no traffic figure for their road, because of where the counters go.

A missing traffic count does not mean a quiet road. No counter means nobody measured the traffic; it says nothing about how many people drive there. The one road where the absence really does mean something is the Ma-11A over the Coll de Sóller — at 10.7 km the longest uncounted road any measured climb here uses, sitting in a band where 73% of the island’s roads are counted. That one is quiet for a known reason: the Ma-11 tunnel took its traffic in 1997, and since 2017 it has not even cost anything to use.

A third of the crashes are on roads closed to bicycles

Some Mallorcan corridors are closed to bicycles: 138.9 km of carriageway across 5 road references, the motorway-standard roads radiating out of Palma. Match the casualty register against them 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.

Treat that as an upper limit. 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

Crashes in town are more common; crashes on the open road are more often fatal. 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 usually survivable; open-road crashes are rarer and far more often fatal. So the fast open kilometres carry the risk of the worst outcome, and those are the kilometres to be visible and predictable on.

The training-camp months are average months for crashes. 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, close to the share any four months of twelve would carry. The island’s worst months for crashes fall outside the camp season.

Hour for hour, the evening is worse than the morning. 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. That is a second reason for the early start everybody here already recommends for the heat. The kit guide covers what the law requires you to be carrying when the light goes.

The commonest kinds of open-road accident.

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.

Cyclist deaths, and why no road gets a cyclist risk rating. 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 deaths are too few to show a pattern. 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 given for the whole island only, and no road here carries a cyclist risk rating, because eleven cases cannot support one.

What riders and coach drivers say, checked against the crash figures

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 agrees with the crash figures from a rider’s point of view. 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.” That was written from the saddle, and the national crash figures say the same thing.

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 answers 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 does show is that the stretch named as the island’s worst for cyclist behaviour produces casualties at one of the lowest rates measured on Mallorca.

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. 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. The heat already tells you to, and the crash hours say the same.

Check what is dug up before you commit to a road. The Consell de Mallorca keeps a register of everything it has closed, coned off or handed to somebody else for the day, and on 18 October 2026 it held 9 live or scheduled entries — 3 of them shutting a road under you — reaching 7 of the climbs and 5 of the signposted routes on this site. Alternating one-way working on a mountain road is a different ride from the one the numbers above describe: what’s shut on Mallorca’s roads names each entry against the climbs and routes it reaches.

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 with at least one accident in the register and a measured length, 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 24 September 2026.

Verified Every figure on this page was re-checked against its source on 24 September 2026. Next review due within 180 days.