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.

So this page does the missing half. Every itinerary the Consell publishes has been transcribed as waypoints, rebuilt along the roads it names, measured against the same 5 m national terrain model this site uses for its climbs — and, where the rebuild can be shown to match, released as a GPX file you can put on a bike computer, free and without 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

The rule this page lives by

A route rebuilt from a paragraph is a hypothesis about which roads the signs follow. The one thing that can test it is the distance the Consell publishes for that route, so that is exactly what it is used for — as a check, never as a value.

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 source publishes for all sixteen, so it is the only one the rule can be built on — and it is used as a check, never as a value. A route outside the tolerance keeps its row in the table, with the disagreement printed, and gets no profile, no GPX and no page, because a reconstruction that does not match the published length is a different ride however plausible it looks. One route carries a second published figure, and it is checked separately below.

Read that table as the honest state of this dataset rather than as a score. 3 of 16 reconstructions land within 2% of the published distance and 8 inside the tolerance, with a median disagreement of 2.6% among those; the worst of the sixteen is out by 21.3%.

The 8 failures do not share a cause, and it is worth saying so rather than inventing a pattern. 4 of them come out too long — a leg went round the houses — and 4 come out too short, which means a piece of the published itinerary is missing from our waypoints entirely. Nor does riding the roads the Consell names predict agreement: 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 is one specific leg, and each is fixable by transcribing more of that route’s itinerary — which is what the next pass over this dataset will do.

One route can be checked twice, and it is worth more than the other fifteen. The Consell publishes a distance for all sixteen and a climb figure for exactly one: Ermites de Ponent is given as 1,196 m of ascent, and our reconstruction of it climbs 1,338 m — +11.9%, against +11.4% on distance. A length and a climb constrain different things — a line can be too long and still climb the right amount, or take the right roads and miss a col — so two excesses of nearly the same size say something a single number cannot: this reconstruction is not one leg that went round the houses, it is uniformly too much road. That is the diagnosis the route leaves behind, and it is why it 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, no email wall, no account. Elevation in every file comes from the terrain model, not from a phone barometer, so the ascent your computer shows on arrival will not match it exactly — nothing ever does — but it is the same measurement for every route here, which is the part that makes them comparable.

The shapes

Drawn from the reconstructed tracks themselves — no map tiles, no third-party script, no cookie. Each line is the route; the island behind it is the same OpenStreetMap coastline.

Which climbs each route actually contains

This is the join the Consell's pages cannot give you and a GPX on its own will not either: the routes crossed with every one of the 122 climb-sides this site has measured, matched on geometry rather than on names. 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 merely brushes a climb's start does not collect it — and a summit reached from the wrong side is marked as a descent, because that is a different day out.

Only climbs this site has measured can appear here — which, since the inventory went island-wide, means any of them in any of the six comarques, not only the Tramuntana passes. One figure in this table deserves 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 column is the least certain number this site publishes — four elevation models put the summit between 189 m and 246 m. It is shown rather than hidden, with this said next to it. A flat route showing no climbs is not a claim that it has none.

How this was built

• 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. No coordinate on this page 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 deliberately 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, which is a different day and is labelled as one. Nothing is matched by name.
• Which part of the island a route runs over is measured, not read off its name. 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, not a label. The geometry walked is the GPX this site publishes 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.
• Which towns with beds reach a route is a road distance through a named door, never a straight line. A route is entered only through a town that is both one of its own waypoints and one of the 32 towns this site has measured a road network from, so every distance printed beside a route is a road metre-count that already existed — never a straight line to the drawn track, which is a simplified shape and would be a second unit standing among the first. The door is printed next to the figure. A waypoint is matched to a town by OpenStreetMap node id and never by name, so “runs through” carries no distance and has 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 door at all, and its page says so rather than reporting a distance it cannot measure.

The whole thing is one script, run over the itineraries transcribed from the published route descriptions.

Two numbers worth carrying away

The hardest accepted route on the island is Serra de Tramuntana - Sud at 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 single most useful thing to know before booking a week here.

Which end of that range you want decides where you should sleep, and it is the one decision this site can help with today. 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 — the start of each is in the table above, taken from the Consell's own itinerary rather than chosen by us. For a base at either end, somewhere to stay and a hire car for the transfer are marked links that pay us if you use them; we have no bike-hire relationship to recommend and will not invent one.

Attribution, because these licences require it

• 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, which is exactly why nothing beyond those facts is taken. 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.