There are few destinations with a seasonality as marked as these islands', and few where that seasonality is so badly distributed. Everyone comes between June and September, and the rest of the year the island is left to the people who live on it.
What is interesting is that there is a kind of trip for which that distribution is exactly inverted. If you come to walk in the mountains, summer is the worst possible moment and winter the best.
01 The calendar is the wrong way round
The reason is temperature. In Palma, the average August high is 30.2 degrees. Walking a mountain stage at that figure, in a limestone range with little shade, is neither pleasant nor sensible.
In winter, by contrast, average highs run from 15.7 degrees in January and February to 19.7 in April. That is exactly the range in which walking works: enough not to feel cold while moving and low enough not to have to stop in the shade.
And it is not a harsh winter. No month of the year drops below average highs of 15.7 degrees in the capital, with lows staying at 8.4 in February. It is a jacket winter, not an overcoat one.
02 What the winter numbers say
It is worth being honest about the rain, because it is the real trade-off. December leaves 49.3 millimetres over 5.9 days, January 44.4 over 6.2 and February 36.7 over 5.9. It rains roughly one day in five.
But those figures need comparing with autumn's, which is when most people look for the off-season. October leaves 72.6 millimetres and November 67.8 over 7.2 days. Which is to say: January and February are considerably drier than October and November.
And March is better still: 29.2 millimetres over 4.6 days, the lowest figure of the wet half-year, with 217 hours of sunshine and highs of 17.6 degrees. If you have to bet on a single month for this, it is March.
03 The path that already exists
This destination's advantage over other Mediterranean mountains is that you do not have to invent the route. There is a long-distance path crossing the Serra de Tramuntana end to end: the Dry Stone Route.
The main route runs from Port d'Andratx, in the south-west, to Port de Pollença, in the north-east, and is organised into eight stages. The Consell de Mallorca has completed the homologation of 137 kilometres of route.
And there is a network of refuges designed precisely for that, with one at the end of each stage. Which is to say: the structure of a week-long walking trip is already built, with its distances, its accommodation and its waymarking.
The path is called the Dry Stone Route because what it crosses is not a wild mountain: it is a built one.
04 What you are walking on
The path's name is not decorative. The Serra de Tramuntana was declared a World Heritage Site in 2011, and it was as a cultural landscape: that is, for what people built on it, not for the mountain itself.
What you find along the route are terrace walls, boundary walls, water galleries, huts and snow houses, all raised with stone fitted together without mortar. That technique is the main reason the range made the list.
And it has a climatic explanation that ties into everything above. Palma gets 470.1 millimetres of rain a year, a semi-arid figure. On an island like that, the terraces and channels are not decoration: they are the system that made it possible to farm a slope.
05 What you will actually lose
First and most obvious: the sea. From December to April the water is between 13.9 and 15.9 degrees. You can look at it, you can walk beside it, but swimming is out unless you are used to cold water.
Second is the light. December has 152 hours of sunshine and November 162, against July's 353. The days are short and that shapes the stages: you have to start early and allow less margin than you would in June.
And third is what is open. Out of season, a good part of the coastal establishments close, and the island runs at another pace. For this trip that is more an advantage than a problem, but it is worth checking what is open on each stage before setting out.
06 If this describes you
The useful question is not whether you like the Balearics, but whether you are interested in the version of these islands that appears in no summer photograph: a limestone range with a maximum height of 1,445 metres, built by hand over centuries and walkable in stages.
And if reading this you think a trip to these islands without swimming makes no sense, you are right for your own case: go in June, with 13.9 millimetres of rain and the sea at 22.5 degrees. What is not worth doing is ruling out winter out of habit, because it is the only season in which this range can be walked end to end.
