Mallorca's official cycling routes, measured

Mallorca has 16 cycling routes that exist as signs on the road. The Consell de Mallorca signposted them, groups them into 4 areas and publishes them as 1,732 km of network, and then publishes each one as a few paragraphs of prose. No track, no elevation profile, no GPX file.

We have filled that gap. We turned each of the Consell’s route descriptions into waypoints, rebuilt the route along the roads it names and measured it against Spain’s 5 m national terrain model, the same one we use for the climbs. Where our version matches the Consell’s own distance, you can download it as a GPX file for your bike computer, free and without giving an email address.

Official routes

16

1,732 km of signposted network, in 4 areas

Reconstructions accepted

8 of 16

984 km of track, 12,448 m of ascent

Median disagreement

5.0%

between our measured distance and the distance the Consell publishes

Which routes you can download, and why

A route rebuilt from a paragraph of directions is our best guess at which roads the signs follow. The only way to check that guess is the distance the Consell publishes for the route, so we use that figure to check ours and never print it as our own.

A reconstruction is published as a track only if its measured distance lands within 5% of the distance the Consell publishes. The distance is the only figure the Consell publishes for all sixteen routes, so the rule has to be built on it. We use it to check our own measurement and never print it as the route’s length. A route outside the tolerance keeps its row in the table, with the difference shown, but gets no profile, no GPX and no page: if our line does not match the published length, it is not the ride the Consell describes, even when it looks right on the map. One route also has a published ascent, and that is checked separately below.

3 of 16 rebuilt routes land within 2% of the published distance, and 8 fall inside the tolerance, with a median difference of 2.6% among those. The worst of the sixteen is out by 21.3%.

We could not rebuild the other 8 reliably, so there is no download for them, and they go wrong in different ways. 4 come out too long, because one leg of our version takes a longer way round than the signs, and 4 come out too short, because part of the Consell’s directions is missing from our waypoints. Sticking to the roads the Consell names does not guarantee a match either: across the sixteen, the correlation between the share on named roads and the size of the error is -0.2, which is no relationship at all. Ermites de Ponent ran 88.5% of its length on the roads the Consell lists, the highest share of any route that failed, and is still 11.4% too long, so one of its legs takes a longer way round than the signs do. Each failure comes down to one leg, and each can be fixed by transcribing more of that route’s directions, which is what the next update will do.

One route can be checked on its climbing as well as its distance. The Consell publishes a distance for all sixteen routes and a climbing figure for only one: Ermites de Ponent is listed at 1,196 m of ascent, and our version of it climbs 1,338 m: +11.9%, against +11.4% on distance. Distance and climbing catch different mistakes. A line can be too long and still climb the right amount, or follow the right roads and miss a col. When both come out too high by nearly the same amount, the extra road is spread around the whole route instead of sitting in one wrong leg. That is why this route has no track here.

By family: Serra de Tramuntana 3/4 · Hermitages 1/4 · Lighthouses 2/4 · Hamlets 2/4.

The 8 routes you can download

GPX, free, with no email and no account needed. The elevation in every file comes from the terrain model, not a phone barometer, so the ascent your bike computer shows at the end will not match it exactly. It is the same measurement for every route here, though, so you can compare them fairly.

The route shapes

Drawn from our rebuilt tracks, with no map tiles, no third-party script and no cookie. Each line is one route, drawn over the same OpenStreetMap coastline.

Which climbs each route actually contains

The Consell’s pages do not tell you which climbs a route includes, and a GPX file on its own will not either. Here are the routes checked against all 122 climbs we have measured, counting each direction up a pass separately, and matched by where the roads go, never by name. 39 of them turn up on these routes. A climb counts only when the track passes both its foot and its summit and covers the right distance between them, so a road that only brushes the start of a climb does not collect it. A summit reached from the far side is marked as a descent, because riding down it is a different day out.

Only climbs we have measured can appear here. That now covers the whole island, all six comarques (the districts the island is divided into), not just the Tramuntana passes. One figure in this table needs its own warning: the steepest kilometre shown for pas de l'Escala de l'amo en Joan Cerdà on the Formentor road. The Ma-2210 is cut into a cliff, and a 5 m terrain model straddles the ledge, so that figure is the least certain number we publish: four elevation models put the summit anywhere between 189 m and 246 m. If a flat route shows no climbs, none of the climbs we have measured are on it; it may still have others.

How we built the tracks

• The itinerary comes from the Consell; the line comes from OpenStreetMap. Each page names the villages, passes, lighthouses and sanctuaries a route visits, in order, plus the numbered roads and the lanes between them. Those names are transcribed as data and resolved against OpenStreetMap, so every waypoint on every route carries an OSM node id. None of the coordinates was typed by hand.
• Routing prefers the roads the source names, including the lanes. Between consecutive waypoints the route takes the shortest path in which the roads and camins the Consell names cost their true length, another numbered road costs twice its length, and an unnamed lane costs eight times. Motorways are removed outright, along with anything tagged private, no-access or no-bicycles. A road closed to cars but open to bikes is kept.
• Elevation is sampled every 20 m from Spain's 5 m national terrain model. Ascent is the sum of the rises in a series smoothed over 100 m. Unsmoothed, the model's own vertical noise adds hundreds of metres of climbing that the road does not have — which is most of why published ascent figures for the same ride disagree. Tunnels and bridges are interpolated between their portals, because a terrain model reads the mountain above a tunnel.
• A route contains a climb only when the geometry says so. A climb is collected when the track passes within 120 m of both its foot and its summit and the distance ridden between those two points is within 30% of that climb’s own measured length. Foot before summit means the route climbs it; the other order means it descends it, and it is labelled as a descent. Climbs are never matched by name.
• The parts of the island a route runs through are measured from its track, whatever its name says. Every consecutive pair of track points is one segment, and its metres go to the comarca its midpoint stands in, so the answer is a length in each comarca. The track used is the GPX published for the route, which reproduces the route’s own measured distance to within eight metres; the simplified track drawn on the page is not used, because it cuts corners and loses up to 16% of the length. Where a segment straddles a boundary its metres go to one side whole, and the summed length of those segments is published per route as the bound on the error.
• The distance from a town with beds to a route is measured by road to a named town on the route, never as a straight line. A route can only be joined at a town that is both one of its own waypoints and one of the 32 towns we have measured a road network from. So every distance printed beside a route is a road distance we had already measured, never a straight line to the drawn track, which is a simplified shape and would mix a second kind of distance in with the first. The town where you join the route is printed next to the figure. A waypoint is matched to a town by OpenStreetMap node id and never by name, so a route that only “runs through” a town carries no distance and there is no unit to get wrong. Where one settlement is mapped under two nodes (s’Arenal is, because it straddles the Palma/Llucmajor boundary and each half is its own statistical entity), the second id is admitted only after both records have been read and the reasoning written down. The cost is that a route whose waypoints are all villages outside the measured set has no joining town at all, and its page says so instead of giving a distance it cannot measure.

It is all one script, run over the directions transcribed from the Consell’s published route descriptions.

The hardest and gentlest routes, and where to stay

The hardest accepted route on the island is Serra de Tramuntana - Sud, with 2,445 m of ascent over 130.3 km: 19 m of climbing for every kilometre ridden, with its high point at 499 m. The gentlest is Fars de Migjorn at 7 m/km. That is a factor of 2.7 between two rides on the same island, and it is the most useful thing to know before you book a week here.

Which end of that range you want should decide where you sleep. The Tramuntana routes start at Sa Coma, Alcúdia and Palmanova, and the flat ones from Platja de Palma, north of Can Picafort and Cala Millor. Each route’s start is in the table above, taken from the Consell’s own directions. For a base at either end, somewhere to stay and a hire car for the transfer are worth booking early.

Data sources and licences

• Route itineraries, names, distances and difficulty grades — Fundació Mallorca Turisme (Consell de Mallorca). Facts only: route names, the towns each route passes through, and the distances and grades the Consell publishes — none of its text is reproduced here, and its distances serve as the independent check our own measurement is scored against. Its own legal notice claims every content on the site as the foundation’s exclusive property («Tots els continguts del web són titularitat exclusiva de l’entitat») and states no reuse terms at all, so we take nothing beyond those facts. Read the notice.
• Road centrelines, waypoint coordinates and every OSM id on this page — OpenStreetMap contributors. ODbL 1.0 — the GPX files are a derivative database and carry the same licence.
• Elevation — Instituto Geográfico Nacional, coverage Elevacion4258_5 (5 m). CC BY 4.0 scne.es — free for commercial use with attribution.

The GPX files are a derivative of OpenStreetMap data and are offered under the same Open Database Licence; each file carries that statement inside it.