When to ride Mallorca

The island does not split neatly into a season and an off-season. October is warmer than May, 23.9 °C against 23.7 °C, and we still rate May the better month to ride. Between December and June the light you can ride in swings by 5h 34m, which is the difference between a ride and a whole day out. No month wins on everything. Each one gives something up, and the table below shows what.

The weather figures are AEMET’s published averages. The light is calculated for Mallorca and checked against the US Naval Observatory’s tables, and the clock-change dates come from the EU directive that sets them.

All twelve months side by side

The light you can actually ride in

Day length is when the sun is up. The number that decides a ride is wider: from civil dawn, when you can see the road without lights, to civil dusk, when you cannot. In Mallorca that window runs about 50 minutes longer than the day itself, and it is the figure we use throughout.

Clock changes: the two evenings that shift by an hour

Nothing changes a riding day here as suddenly as the last Sunday in March and the last Sunday in October. The rule is set by Directive 2000/84/EC: clocks go forward at 01:00 GMT in March and back at 01:00 GMT in October. The date falls on a different day of the month each year, so we calculate it for each year below.

The wind, and why it is not in the verdict

The tables above rank the twelve months. The wind is the one thing riders ask about here that mostly cannot be ranked by month. That conclusion comes from 87,017 hourly observations at Palma de Mallorca, 2015–2024.

Across one day, the wind at this station changes by 4.4 m/s in July between its calmest riding hour and its windiest. Across the whole year, the biggest difference between any two months compared at the same hour is 2.6 m/s. That second number is smaller than the day’s own spread in eleven months of the twelve and level with it in December. In no month of the year does picking a different month move the wind as much as picking a different hour of the same day.

No start time helps with the hard days. Force 6, which is 10.8 m/s or 39 km/h, blows in 2.2% of riding hours in February against 0.2% in June: about one riding hour in 46 against one in 640. That part does follow the season, and it is the part of the island’s wind worth choosing a month for. It peaks in February, not in summer, which is when most people picture wind in Mallorca. We count hours on the road rather than whole days for a reason: in eleven months of the twelve, force 6 is more common during riding hours than across the full twenty-four, by as much as 1.7 times. Counted over the whole day, it would look lower than what a rider meets, everywhere except December.

Why is there no wind column in the verdict? The part of the wind that differs between months is small: one hard hour in 46, in the worst month of the year. A threshold drawn across figures that small would have been drawn after seeing which months it caught. The three thresholds we do apply were set at the point where a rider’s day changes. The wind figures are here for you to weigh yourself instead.

The clock here is the island’s and the compass is this station’s. A sea breeze blows onshore, so a wind rose measured on the bay of Palma is not the rose at Port de Pollença, and nothing on this page models a coast it has not measured.

Source NOAA NCEI — Integrated Surface Database, global hourly (NOAA Open Data Dissemination) · checked 16 August 2026A work of the United States Government: public domain, free to use, including commercially.

Fifty years of Mallorca wind, explained for cyclists →

How the verdict is worked out

Three thresholds, applied to every month in the same way, each set at the point where a rider’s day changes. A daily high at or above 28.0 °C means the start time matters more than the route. 6 or more days of rain in the month means a wet day in most weeks, and the number of wet days matters more than the total: 32 mm across five days is a different holiday from 32 mm in one afternoon. A light window under 11h 00m means a long ride uses all of it. What a month earns us plays no part in the calculation.

Where the light figures come from

We calculate the sun times ourselves, then check them against an independent source: US Naval Observatory, Astronomical Applications — Sun and Moon Data for One Day publishes sunrise, sunset and civil twilight for any location. On 24 dates spread through the year, 24 agree to the minute, and the largest difference anywhere is 1 minute. Both publish whole minutes, so a difference that small is rounding, not an error.

How we got this Sun times computed with the NOAA solar-position algorithm for the reference year 2027 and checked against the US Naval Observatory. Sunrise and sunset are the upper limb on a sea horizon; civil dawn and dusk are the sun 6° below it.A sea horizon. Terrain is not modelled: a valley under the Serra de Tramuntana loses the sun well before these times and a summit keeps it later. The figures are the island’s, not a road’s.Computed from civil dawn, sunrise, solar noon, sunset and civil dusk for a sea horizon, computed for Palma and rendered in Balearic local time — including the clock change, which follows the directive rather than a timezone database and is evaluated per event, so the two changeover Sundays are right.Computed 13 October 2026.

Every month in full

• May 23.7 °C · 15h 22m May in detail →
• April 19.8 °C · 14h 11m April in detail →
• March 17.5 °C · 12h 51m March in detail →
• June 28.1 °C · 16h 00m June in detail →
• September 27.9 °C · 13h 21m September in detail →
• February 15.4 °C · 11h 38m February in detail →
• October 23.9 °C · 12h 04m October in detail →
• November 19.0 °C · 10h 59m November in detail →
• July 31.2 °C · 15h 42m July in detail →
• August 31.3 °C · 14h 39m August in detail →
• January 15.2 °C · 10h 43m January in detail →
• December 16.1 °C · 10h 26m December in detail →

How to read the light figures: they are the island’s, not a road’s. Terrain is not modelled, so a valley under the Serra goes dark earlier than the table says and a summit stays light later.

Sources