Sports in Mallorca, the island that trains all year

Here's a number worth knowing: every winter and spring, the professional cycling peloton quietly relocates to this island. World Tour teams, Olympic squads, and thousands of amateurs who want to ride the same roads. Mallorca isn't a beach with a football team attached. It's one of Europe's great year-round training grounds that happens to have beaches.

It also has a top-flight football club, the best futsal team in Europe playing next door, the most famous tennis academy on earth forty minutes up the road, and a bay that fills with racing sails every August.

Not bad for a place people still mistake for a package holiday.

Real Mallorca: Saturday afternoons at Son Moix

RCD Mallorca have spent most of their recent history in La Liga, which means Real Madrid and Barcelona come to visit and the island turns up. Home is the Estadi Mallorca Son Moix on the edge of Palma, renovated in recent years into a proper modern ground.

For a newcomer it's an easy habit to build. Tickets come straight from the club site, prices sit well below big-city La Liga levels, and outside the two giant visits you can decide to go on the morning of the match. The crowd is local, family-heavy and welcoming, with a decent sprinkling of resident foreigners who've adopted the club. Say "Mallorca" not "Majorca" and you're halfway in.

Cycling: the island's true religion

This is what Mallorca is famous for among people who sweat for fun. The Serra de Tramuntana gives you a spine of climbs with silky tarmac and painted names of pros on the road, and the calm flat interior gives you recovery days among the almond trees. Hire shops in every town will set you up with a carbon road bike by the day or week.

The bucket-list ride is Sa Calobra: a snake of hairpins dropping to the sea, famous because the only way out is back up. Coll de Sóller and the lighthouse road to Cap de Formentor complete the set. And if you want a target, the island's great spring sportive shuts down half the mountain roads for thousands of riders every April.

You don't need to be fast. Half the peloton out here is retirees in club kit having the time of their lives.

August is the wrong month to start, and the right month to plan. Serious riders come here from February to May, when the roads are cool and empty. In high summer the Tramuntana is hot by 9am and busy with hire cars, so ride at dawn or wait for October, when the island gives you its best cycling weather and almost nobody to share it with.

Tennis: the house that Rafa built

Mallorca produced the man many consider the greatest competitor tennis has seen, and he never really left. Rafael Nadal is from Manacor, inland in the east, and his Rafa Nadal Academy there is now a small campus: pro players training, kids from fifty countries, a sports centre you can actually book courts at, and a museum where the trophy cabinet stops being believable about halfway along.

For residents the practical bit is simple: the academy and clubs across the island make tennis one of the easiest sports to play here year-round, and the padel courts that came with the Spanish boom are everywhere. Book through the usual apps, or just ask at your nearest club; the standard is friendly.

Sailing: the bay earns its reputation

Palma's bay is one of the great sailing waters of the Mediterranean, and the calendar proves it: an Olympic-class regatta fills the bay with hundreds of boats each spring, and in August the Copa del Rey, Spain's most prestigious regatta, brings the serious money and the seriously quick crews to the Real Club Náutico.

You don't need a yacht to take part in any of this. Sailing schools around the bay run courses for adults who've never touched a tiller, club noticeboards look for weekend crew, and turning up willing is most of the qualification. Watching the August racing from the seafront with a drink is also a legitimate sport.

Palma Futsal: the best team you've never heard of

Time for the island's best-kept secret. Palma Futsal won back-to-back European titles, beating the traditional giants of the sport, and they play at the Palau d'Esports Son Moix, right next to the football stadium. Five-a-side indoor football at this level is absurdly quick, the hall is loud, tickets cost pocket change, and kids get waved in with a smile.

A European champion in your adopted hometown, playing to a packed local crowd on a Friday night: that's the kind of thing you move abroad for.

On foot: the dry-stone route

The GR221 threads the whole Tramuntana range along old dry-stone paths: olive terraces, mountain passes, villages like Deià and Sóller strung along it like beads. You can walk it in ambitious week-long chunks or just do the classic day stages; either way it's some of the best hiking in the Mediterranean, and in winter, when the trails are cool and empty, it's arguably at its best.

Trail runners have colonised the same paths, and the island's race calendar now runs deep into the mountains. Start with a Sóller loop and see how your legs feel about the rest.

In the water: the warm half of the year

From May to October the sea is the island's biggest gym. Open-water swimmers trace the buoy lines off Palma's beaches, paddleboards head out at dawn before the wind, and the northern bays of Alcúdia and Pollença, shallow and breezy, are the kitesurfing and wingfoil schools' home turf. Triathlon has planted its flag too; the island hosts serious races each season, including a long-standing half-distance event in the north.

The rule of thumb: mornings for flat water, afternoons for wind sports, and always a coffee in a port afterwards. This is still Mallorca.

Day to day: studios, courts and the off-season

Palma covers the everyday basics well: gyms across the city, yoga studios with classes in English, padel and tennis by the hour through the booking apps. Out of season is when the island is at its sporting best; the crowds thin, the roads empty, the trails cool down, and you get world-class training terrain more or less to yourself.

Locals will tell you the winter is when you really learn to love living here. They're usually saying it from a bike.