There are no rubbish bikes in Mallorca. If you were ever slightly suspicious as to whether companies actually sold their five-digit hero bikes – and indeed to whom, and where they got ridden – your answer is on this island. And yet for the most part, the riders who come here tend to tick off the same two climbs, Sa Calobra and Cap de Formentor, before packing their Bike Box Alans onto the next flight home.
Don’t get me wrong, those climbs are stunning with a capital S-bend, so much so that if you only had a single cycling day left on Earth you might well choose one of them to ride. But I’ve been assured that if I do have a little more time on both island and mortal coil, and I fancy putting some clear air between myself and everyone else, then today’s Big Ride is the hidden gem I’ve been looking for.
Beach combing
We strike out from Esporles, and a boulevard that’s quintessential Mallorca: houses built from the island’s marés sandstone glow behind leafy planes, the early sun conjuring a dreamy light you could almost inhale. The few townsfolk out at this hour shuffle along with bakery bags and newspapers under their arms, taking in the gently warming air. It’s the kind of place where you just want to sit down with the old men in flat caps and play dominoes.
Today’s plan is to hit four beaches, the first three diminutive and lesser-known, the fourth the mighty Port de Sóller, which along with Port de Pollença and where we’re staying at the Zafiro Palace Alcudia, are among the more popular spots on the island. Owen seems excited by the prospect of these first three, explaining that he rarely ventures this far west. As a ride guide for tour operator Ciclos Major, his clients tend to come for those big scalps in the north and east.
It rings true. We’ve been riding for half an hour and we’ve not seen another soul, least of all on a bike. Almost unheard of for a place that welcomes 200,000 cyclists annually – more than a fifth of Mallorca’s population.
The road climbs steadily until we’re finally transposed onto a corniche of crisp tarmac scribing the edge of the cliffs. Views twist and plummet seawards, the road cutting in and out of thick forest, and there’s a distinct lack of agreement between my computer screen and the sensation of height. We’re little more than 450m up, apparently, yet when the road swoops down it feels like we’re falling from an aeroplane.
I slow up to take a hard right but Owen shouts to keep going – we’ll come back to this turn later; first we must drop into the beach at Cala Banyalbufar, then ride the same road back out again, the Coll de sa Bastida.
Words and numbers
Inuits have 52 words to describe snow, and as we descend it occurs to me cyclists should have more for roads. We spend enough time discussing them yet right now I can’t do much better than ‘wide’, ‘smooth’ and ‘tarmac’. Also add ‘glorious’.
Given these descriptors, our progress to sea level is rapid, aided by eerily quiet surroundings and an ever-sharpening gradient. By the time we’ve reached the beach we’ve encountered one car – notable for the tannoy on its roof playing a strange, piccolo-based tune – and have lost 300m in a little over 4km.
If the last few streets to the beach are steep to go down it’s nothing compared to how steep they are going back up: 20, 22 and 24% come and go, accompanied by the haunting melody of the car.
Upon exiting Banyalbufar village it becomes clear the vehicle’s occupants are something akin to ‘knockers’, those folk who knocked on the doors of 1980s Britain selling cleaning products. The song is a Pied Piper call to come out and buy, though with plenty of microfibre cloths at home I’m OK to be leaving both car and climb behind.
We retrace tracks and drop through a couple of hairpins… and what a difference a few kilometres and presumably some budgetary cuts makes.
In describing the road down to the next beach, Port des Canonge, I’d choose ‘narrow’, ‘rough’ and ‘unsuitable’. The hairpins are deeply scarred, cars evidently struggling to make such sharp turns without momentarily beaching their underbellies. We get ever closer to the sea, luminous behind the green scrub and tawny rock.
And again
We climb back up in earnest, through Canonge’s contorting hairpins and on towards the Coll d’en Claret. At a shade over 500m, this is one of the middling peaks in the Serra de Tramuntana, which run down Mallorca’s northwest. It’s rideable from multiple directions, including Esporles. From there, the Coll d’en Claret is 13km at 3%, but from Port des Canonge the average gradient doubles. Despite this, Owen is able to talk freely, while I’m able to complete most of a sentence before gasping for breath. I take comfort in the fact he is 15kg lighter, 15 years younger and has a moustache, which I’m told is fashionable among the young as well as working like a trip-strip for smoother laminar airflow.
If below was like an evacuated town, the top of the Coll d’en Claret is a comparative Piccadilly Circus. Several cars come past then a group of cyclists – there must have been at least three, maybe even four. But no sooner has rush hour abated than we’re on our own again – higher, cooler, damper and once more poised with wheels aimed at the sea.
The descent to Port de Valldemossa is spectacular. Sa Calobra it is not, but it’s every bit as fantastic a piece of civil engineering, etched improbably into the rock, scything through pine forests and rarely burdened with thoughts of safety barriers.
It requires a great deal of concentration. Sightlines are poor, sections of the road gravel-strewn, but as a result the thrill is electric, and as the trees recede to reveal a coastal panorama I feel sure this will be the climb of the day.
To cap it all, there’s a lovely restaurant at the bottom. Or it would cap it all had I not long since learned the hard way that an indulgent meal plus a lengthy climb has a similar effect on my body as drinking five pints – I just want to lie down with a bag of peanuts. Nine hairpins and two burning quads later we’ve resumed our perch at 500m, the road to Valldemossa returning to its hiding place in the pines.
Bohemian rhapsody
A gentle, undulating road carries us through Mirador and on to Deià, the stomping ground of artists and celebs down the years from Hendrix and Jagger to Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta-Jones. The Darling Buds Of May, what a show.
We stop to peer into the house-turned-museum of celebrated English poet Robert Graves. I confess to Owen I have no idea who Robert Graves is, save for having just learned that he is a celebrated English poet from the plaque outside. Still, I get the appeal of Deià. Terracotta roofs dot themselves among the poplars and olive groves, the backdrop a competition between sea and sky as to which can be the bluest. We’re not alone in our seduction – Deià is evidently a tourist trap, so I’m glad enough when we drift away on the comforting metronomics of our freewheels.
For a while we descend in peace, but as we near our last sea-level visit of the day we find ourselves in a traffic jam. Sóller and its port are two of the most popular and populous parts of the island, which is a shame as this road would clearly be something of a rollercoaster otherwise.
When we arrive in Port de Sóller – all pretty beach, bougie restaurants and genteel wooden tram – I can imagine why this was quite the place in its 20th century heyday. Not to say it no longer is, but having come from where we’ve come from, Sóller’s busyness is overwhelming. Still, in another world, if this was the beginning and end of this ride, I think I’d find it very different.
Racing home
It’s sweet relief when we make the final turn across a main road and up onto the first hairpins of the Coll de Sóller. The tunnel built below now syphons traffic away, leaving the slopes of this climb devoid of motor vehicles.
The resulting silence has a wintry softness to it, and down to a leaf, everything is still. We toil up and up, Owen at pains to tell me to watch the mossy edges of the hairpins, as much a product of the lack of car tyres as they are their positions in shadow. Sure enough, when I stand and push I feel my wheel slip.
Farm terraces ripple in topographical contours from a summit we can’t yet see, and by the time we reach the top a woman is already clearing away the plastic chairs of her cafe. Almost too cheerfully she announces she is closed, but we’re not in any danger of stopping.
Unfurling below is a road of Scalextric proportions, carving and doubling back on itself with childlike abandon, so seemingly inefficient as a means of getting traffic down a hillside, and yet so well suited to the joy of riding.
At the bottom I’m under no illusions that we still have some way to go before our return to Esporles, but I’m absolutely convinced this is one of the sweetest climbs and most arresting descents on the island. I’m also left in no doubt there are few better rides than this one to escape the Mallorcan hordes.
Rolling in the isles
A brief history of Mallorcan cycling
Team Sky might have put Mallorca on the modern cycling map by making the island its winter training base, but this place has its own, much older cycling lore.
As the local historians tell it, the first bike that appeared on the island wasn’t Wiggins’s Pinarello Dogma but rather a velocipede imported by wealthy French banker Ernesto Canut in 1869 (some years before the invention of the chain-driven safety bicycle, so one can only imagine how he fared in such a hilly place).
By the 1920s Mallorca’s capital, Palma, had its own velodrome and the island was beginning to turn out some top track riders as well as holding its own international events. But tragedy struck twice in the 1930s – first in 1934 when José Nicolau, aka ‘The Canon of Llorito’, crashed and later died during a meet at the Tirador Velodrome; then in 1936 when a similar fate befell Rafael Pou. The first Mallorcan to finish the Vuelta a España and a huge track star, Pou crashed while training behind a derny on the same velodrome’s banks.
Such setbacks didn’t dampen the local enthusiasm for cycling, and Mallorca has since produced double Olympic gold track medallist Joan Llaneras (2000 and 2008), has hosted the Vuelta three times (1975, 1986, 1991) and as of 1992 has its own European-level races, today called the Challenge Vuelta Ciclista a Mallorca. But among amateur cyclists, arguably the biggest annual draw is the Mallorca 312, a 312km, 5,050m total elevation sportive circumnavigating the island. The next one is on 26th April.
How we did it
Travel
Fancy an adventure? Try driving to Mallorca – Eurotunnel, through France, Spain and then a ferry to the island. Easy. Not quite got the time? Wherever you are in the UK, a raft of year-round flights service the island. Cyclist flew from Bristol Airport for around £260 return with a bike bag.
Accommodation
We stayed at the five-star Zafiro Palace Alcudia, whose all-day buffet is a godsend to any cyclist arriving bedraggled and sweaty and in need of immediate sustenance. The Zafiro Palace Alcudia also boasts a host of swimming pools, a delightful spa to unwind those burning quads, and a huge and comprehensive bike workshop and bike hire space. There's also an array of on-site restaurants (available as all inclusive should you so wish) that are all genuinely superb, from sushi to an incredible grill-house. Prices from around £120pn. See zafirohotels.com.
Thanks
Mighty big thanks to Darryl and Liz, who run cycle guiding outfit Ciclos Major out of the Zafiro Palace Hotel, and their guide Owen. Darryl has been cycling and working on the island for years and there is no corner he doesn’t know, nor wouldn’t be prepared to show you, whether as part of a group or as a self-directed ride. See ciclosmajor.com for Ciclos Major’s 2025 calendar, including entry and packages around Mallorca 312 in April. Thanks also to the team at MMGY Global for arranging this trip. See mmgyglobal.com.
