When to ride Mallorca

The island does not have a season and an off-season. October is warmer than May — 23.9 °C against 23.7 °C — and this site still rates 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 here simply beats another; they trade, and the table below is what they trade.

Every figure below is a measurement or a citation: the weather from AEMET’s published normals, the light computed for this island and checked against the Naval Observatory’s own tables, the clock change from the directive that sets it.

The twelve, 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 this site uses everywhere.

The two evenings that change overnight

Nothing on this island moves a riding day as abruptly as the last Sunday in March and the last Sunday in October. The rule is fixed by Directive 2000/84/EC — forward at 01:00 GMT in March, back at 01:00 GMT in October — so the dates land on a different number every year and are computed here rather than written down.

The wind, and why it is not in the verdict

Every table above ranks the twelve months. The wind is the one thing riders here ask about that mostly refuses to be ranked — and finding that out took 87,017 hourly observations from Palma de Mallorca, 2015–2024, rather than an opinion.

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.

What the clock cannot touch is the hard days. Force 6 — 10.8 m/s, 39 km/h — reaches 2.2% of riding hours in February against 0.2% in June — about one riding hour in 46 against one in 640. That is a season, and it is the half of the island’s wind worth choosing a month over — and it peaks in February, not in the summer the words “Mallorca” and “wind” usually conjure together. One more thing the counting turned up, which is the reason these are hours out on the road rather than whole days: force 6 is commoner inside riding hours than across the full twenty-four in eleven months of the twelve, by as much as 1.7 times. Counted over the whole day it would read lower than a rider meets, everywhere except December.

So why is there no wind column in the verdict? Because the half that ranks months is smaller than it sounds: one hard hour in 46, in the worst month of the year, and a threshold drawn across figures that small would have been drawn after seeing which months it caught. The three thresholds this page does apply were set at the point a rider’s day changes shape. This one is published instead of applied, so you can weigh it yourself.

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 access · checked 16 August 2026A work of the United States Government: public domain, free to use, including commercially.

The whole record: fifty years of Mallorcan wind, read like a cyclist →

How the verdict is worked out

Three thresholds, applied to every month the same way and chosen for the point at which a rider’s day changes shape. A daily high at or above 28.0 °C makes the ride a question of start time rather than route. 6 or more days of rain in the month is a week with a wet one in it, and the count 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 day uses all of it. Nothing in the calculation can see what a month earns this site.

Where the light figures come from

The sun times are computed here, not looked up, and then checked against somebody who has no reason to agree with us: US Naval Observatory, Astronomical Applications — Sun and Moon Data for One Day publishes rise, set and civil twilight for any coordinate. On 24 dates spread through the year, 24 agree to the minute and the largest disagreement anywhere is 1 minute. Both sides publish whole minutes, so that is the resolution of the comparison rather than an error in it.

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 4 September 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