Mallorca cycling wind: the best time of day to ride

On Mallorca the wind depends on the time of day far more than on the month. Most mornings are calm, in every month of the year. A sea breeze comes in off the water between 11:00 and 13:00 and blows through the afternoon. And on a small share of days, mostly from November to March, a hard wind, most often from W, turns a ride into a fight.

Be on the road by 10:00, an hour before the sea breeze can arrive in any month. The earlier you go, the calmer it is: at 08:00 most mornings have no wind at all. The sea breeze slows your ride home; the hard wind decides whether you go out at all. A week you book for the heat is unlikely to be the one that gets blown out.

The figures come from the hourly wind readings at Palma de Mallorca, on the bay of Palma, which go back to 1973.

In July it is calm in 61.9% of hours at 08:00 and in 0.6% of hours at 16:00. The mean is 1.8 m/s (6 km/h) at 08:00 and 6.1 m/s (22 km/h) at 15:00, the windiest hour of a July day. From the quietest riding hour, 07:00, to the windiest, that is a swing of 4.4 m/s inside one day. The widest gap between any two months at the same hour, anywhere in the year, is 2.6 m/s. So the swing inside one day is about 1.7× the biggest swing between months: the hour you ride matters more than the month you book.

The sea breeze runs to a timetable, and it runs all year

The land heats faster than the sea, the air over it rises, and air comes in off the water to replace it. The sun drives it, so a sea breeze starts at a time of day rather than on a particular day, and it starts at roughly the same time over the whole island because the whole island warms under the same sun.

The table counts it as starting at the first hour after 06:00 at which the wind comes from the sea more often than it is calm.

How we got this Hourly surface observations from NOAA's Integrated Surface Database, cut to the island's bounding box, assessed by counting, and aggregated by month and local hour over two ten-year eras. One observation per local hour, METAR preferred over SYNOP. Directions are the direction the wind blows FROM, in sixteen points; shares are of all hours in the cell, so calm, variable and the sixteen sectors sum to 100.Computed from 87,017 hourly observations over 3,644 days at Palma de Mallorca (LEPA), 2015–2024, with 86,167 more from 1975–1984.Computed 16 August 2026.

The sea breeze arrives between 11:00 and 13:00 in every month, January as much as July. In winter it blows less hard once it has started, and it does not turn the wind round the way it does from April to October (see below).

At 08:00 it is calm in more than half of all hours in every month of the year. The lowest calm figure in any month is 57.8%. The earlier you start, the more of your ride is done before the sea breeze arrives.

April to October: the afternoon wind comes from the opposite side

The “Morning → afternoon turn” column is the angle between the average direction the wind blows from at 08:00 and at 16:00, taking the short way round the compass. A number near 180° means the afternoon wind comes from exactly where the morning wind was going.

7 months of the year sit at 170° or more. From April to October the wind turns end for end every day. At breakfast there is usually little or none, and what there is blows off the land from NNE/NE/ENE. By mid-afternoon the sea breeze blows from SSW/SW/WSW, the opposite quarter. The other 4 months — January, February, November, December — have the afternoon sea breeze too, but the wind does not reverse: their mornings already blow from NW/NNW/WNW, and the wind stays roughly there. March is the month the pattern switches on, at 136°: a NNE morning becomes a SW afternoon by four, short of the full summer reversal.

That turns the usual cycling advice about wind upside down.

So plan by the clock. The wind here keeps a timetable you can read in advance, and the one thing you control is where you are at what time.

Two different winds: the afternoon sea breeze and the Beaufort 6 days

Two different winds get called “the wind on Mallorca”, and most of the direction advice you will read mixes them up.

The first is the sea breeze: reliable, moderate, and it is the one you meet on almost every ride. 57.0% of all hours at 16:00 blow from SSW/SW/WSW.

The second is the wind the island is famous for. Beaufort 6 starts at 10.8 m/s, 39 km/h, the point at which a headwind starts to dictate the whole ride. Of the 786 hours at Beaufort 6 or above, 30.7% come from W alone and 25.6% from the four northern points. Wind blowing in off the sea, from SSW/SW/WSW, accounts for 16.5%.

So your two questions get two different answers. How much wind will I be riding in this afternoon? A sea breeze, from the south-west, arriving on schedule. Will there be a day this week I should not go out at all? That depends on a different wind, from the other half of the compass, and it is mostly a question for November to March. March, a popular month for riding here, has the most days of strong wind: it reaches Beaufort 6 on 12.1% of days, and August on 1.6%. The sea breeze slows your ride home; the hard wind decides whether you go out at all.

Which loops finish into the afternoon sea breeze

On a loop, every kilometre ridden into the wind is very nearly matched by one ridden with it. Across all 16 published routes, the whole-loop headwind share lands between 21.4% and 35.0%, too narrow a range to choose a route by. The table below shows the 7 of them close enough to Palma for its wind readings to apply.

What does matter is where in the ride the headwind falls, because the sea breeze keeps time. Start at eight and you are in the last quarter of a long loop at exactly the hour the wind peaks. The table gives the share of the final quarter ridden within 45° of straight into the afternoon sea breeze, and across these routes it ranges from almost nothing to more than half.

How we got this Each track is cut into segments, each segment given a bearing, and a segment counts as into the wind when it travels within 45° of straight into the afternoon sea breeze. The published figure is the share of the final quarter of the distance, in the direction the route's own publisher draws it.Computed from 16 published routes with a measured track, 7 of them inside the basin.Computed 16 August 2026.

Serra de Tramuntana - Sud finishes with 57.1% of its last quarter pointed into the sea breeze, and its whole-loop figure — 29.9% — hides that completely. Fars de Ponent finishes with 2.1%. The two are 7.3 points apart on the whole-loop figure and 55.0 points apart on the one that describes the afternoon. When you pick a loop, read the last-quarter column.

Three caveats before you use it. The figures follow the publisher’s direction of travel — ride the loop the other way and head and tail swap. They measure a quarter of the distance, not of the time, so on a mountain loop the last quarter is ridden later than this implies and the figure is conservative. And they use Palma’s compass: the 9 routes with any point beyond 35 km of the station are left out — Fars de Migjorn (41.8 km), Ermites del Raiguer (43.1 km), Llogarets del Raiguer (47.3 km), Serra de Tramuntana nord (47.3 km), Serra de Tramuntana - Central 1 (50.5 km), Llogarets del Llevant (56.2 km), Ermites del Llevant (56.8 km), Far de Formentor (61.4 km), Fars del Llevant (66.3 km) — because an onshore breeze at Port de Pollença is a north-easterly, and the Palma station cannot see it.

Forty years apart: the same station in two decades

The station has been reporting since 1973, so the wind of 1975–1984 can be set against the wind of 2015–2024, forty years later. The shape of the day is the same. In July the afternoon wind came in off the sea, from SSW/SW/WSW, in 77.3% of hours forty years ago and in 77.3% now. The timetable a rider plans around has not changed.

What these figures cannot tell you: the mountains, other coasts, gusts

• Wind directions are for the Palma coast. The wind directions are measured at Palma de Mallorca, on the bay of Palma. A sea breeze blows onshore, so the same physics gives a south-westerly here and a north-easterly at Port de Pollença. The hours hold across the island and the directions do not, and no figure is converted from one coast to another.
• No wind data for the mountains. The station is 8 m above the sea. The one station in the database on the Serra — ALFABIA MTN RANGE, at 1015 m — reports a median of 868 usable hours a year against 2,000 needed, so there is no wind data at all for the mountains you come here to ride.
• No estimate of time lost. Turning a headwind into minutes lost needs a drag model, which would be a second model of the rider, and only one is used here. The route figures show which way you are pointing in which hour, and what that costs you depends on your legs.
• Gusts are not included. Every figure is a sustained speed. The database carries gusts in an optional section whose coverage here is thin, and a gust figure drawn from so little data would not be reliable.

Know before you ride

• Start early. The quiet window ends between 11:00 and 13:00 in every month of the year, so be rolling by 10:00; the earlier the better. Rolling out at seven rather than ten is worth more than choosing a different week: 1.7× more, measured at Palma across the hours between 07:00 and 20:00.
• Plan around the last hour of the ride. On a loop the headwind share barely varies; the final quarter varies from 2.1% to 57.1%, and the final quarter is the part you ride at four in the afternoon.
• Do not use the morning wind to choose a direction. For 7 months of the year it will have reversed before you turn round, and most mornings there is not enough of it to choose by in the first place.
• The hard days come from November to March. March has the most, reaching Beaufort 6 on 12.1% of days; August on 1.6%. A week you book for the heat is unlikely to be the one that gets blown out.
• Everything above is measured at sea level on the bay of Palma. The timing holds across the island; the direction is specific to this coast. Read the regions guide for what changes as you move across the island, and the 312 guide for the ride whose second half lands in the windiest hours of the day.

How we got this A station is usable when it delivers at least 2,000 observations carrying a wind speed in at least 8 distinct years. 1 of 6 passes. The others are listed with their counts, including the ridge station, which reports too few hours to use.Computed from 6 stations inside the island's bounding box, each counted.Computed 16 August 2026.