Mallorca is fine. That's the problem

I’ve ridden nearly every road Mallorca has. The climb up Sa Calobra. The lighthouse out to Formentor. The long flat slog across the plain before you earn the mountains. Eva and I lived there. I know it well enough to tell you it’s a good place to ride a bike.

That is not a compliment.

Good is where ambition goes to feel comfortable. Good is the default. Good is what you choose when you’ve stopped asking questions. And every February, thousands of cyclists — people who train seriously, who talk about watts and suffering and marginal gains — pack their bikes into cardboard boxes and fly to the same island, ride the same roads, photograph the same cape, and call it a cycling trip.

Scroll through Instagram in late February & March. Count the Cap de Formentor shots. Count them. Everyone is at the same viewpoint, same angle, same light, same caption about escaping winter. It’s not a cycling trip anymore. It’s a cycling costume.

I’m not here to tell you Mallorca is bad. I’m here to tell you that cycling it on repeat, year after year, is a failure of curiosity.

Last autumn, I was in the Sierra Nevada with Eva and our friend Rianne, shooting the new collection for Label Collective. We were staying near the summit — one of the apartments up in the ski station. On the first proper day of riding, we descended all the way down to Pinos Genil, rolled along to Güéjar Sierra, and then turned around and climbed back up. All the way up. Past the ski station, past the barrier at Hoya de la Mora where the road closes to cars, up the broken asphalt where the mountain stops caring about your tyres, to 3,398 metres — the summit of Pico Veleta.

For context: the road from Granada to Veleta is 43 kilometres. It is higher than anything the Tour de France dares to send its riders up. The Vuelta turns its peloton around at 2,500 metres. The mountain is, as one writer put it, simply too high — too high for grand tours, too high for most cyclists, too high to have accumulated the reputation it deserves.

What stays with me is how the landscape changed. You start in trees — dense, green, full of light and shade. The kind of riding that feels like southern Spain on a good day, warm and olive-scented. And then, somewhere above 2,500 metres, it just... stops. The trees end. The colour drains. The road surface gets rougher. You’re suddenly riding through something that looks like the surface of the moon — browns, slates, nothing living, the sky enormous and the air thin and cold. And you keep going because there’s nothing else to do, and then you reach the top, and you look out, and you think: Mallorca doesn’t have this.

Mallorca doesn’t have a climb that strips the landscape bare around you. It doesn’t have a summit that makes you feel genuinely small. It’s a beautiful island. It has hills. It is not this.

The French Pyrenees will do something different to you. The Tourmalet. The Aubisque. These aren’t just famous climbs — they’re climbs that carry weather in a way a Mediterranean island simply cannot. You can leave the valley floor under blue sky and spend the top half of an ascent inside a cloud, fighting a headwind that has come straight off the Atlantic with nothing to slow it down. The descents are long and cold and technical and real.

There is something honest about mountain riding that doesn’t exist in Mallorca. The mountain doesn’t reward you because you showed up. It rewards you when you’re ready, and sometimes it doesn’t reward you at all. That tension is the thing worth chasing.

I understand the appeal of Mallorca. The logistics are easy. The weather is reliable. Everyone you know is going. There are good coffee stops and the roads are smooth and you can be back at the hotel in time for dinner. None of that is nothing.

But if you’re the kind of rider who talks about what the sport means to you — if it’s more than fitness, if it’s about being somewhere and feeling something — then you owe it to yourself to ask why you keep going back to the same island. Is it because it’s the best option? Or because it’s the path of least resistance dressed up as tradition?

Tuscany. Andalusia. Montenegro. The Pyrenees. The Sierra Nevada. There are roads out there that will change something in how you think about cycling — that will give you a story you haven’t already heard from six people in your group chat. They require a bit more planning and a bit less certainty about the weather, and that is exactly the point.

Mallorca will be there when you get back. It’ll still be fine.