Everything in the Serra de Tramuntana, the mountain wall that runs along Mallorca's northwest coast for about ninety kilometres, comes to a head at Formentor. After all the terraced olive groves, stone villages and hairpin passes, the range pushes out into the sea as a narrow, jagged peninsula, with cliffs dropping vertically for several hundred metres on both sides. The Tramuntana was listed by UNESCO in 2011 as a cultural landscape, in recognition of the dry-stone terraces and water systems that generations of farmers built into the slopes, and this is the wildest end of it.
The road that gets you here is a masterpiece in its own right. It was built in the late 1920s under the Italian engineer Antonio Parietti, who chose a line hugging the cliffs, with bridges, tunnels and viewpoints, and the road is still essentially unchanged. At the Mirador des Colomer, a stone terrace on the edge, you look down some two hundred metres to the water and across to a pinnacle of rock sticking out of the sea. The gradient is gentle, the bends are many, and the surface is generally good, though it can be rough in places. Do not look at the scenery while you ride, because the drop is real.
In July and August, traffic on the Formentor road is heavy, with coaches, rental cars and cyclists in every corner, so go early, before nine, when the light is clear and the road is almost empty. You may meet wild goats on the road, standing still and unbothered, and see raptors circling over the cliffs. Eleonora's falcons nest on the cliffs in summer and hunt migrating birds in the autumn. The sea below is an astonishing turquoise, and the pine forest smells of resin.
The bay of Formentor, with its long pale beach, is a short stop on the way, and a famous old hotel above it hosted writers, artists and politicians in the twentieth century. Wind at the end of the cape can be strong, and a sudden gust on a cliff road is not to be underestimated. Late September is a good time, when the summer crowds are gone and the sea is still warm.