Public Holidays in Mallorca: What Actually Closes, and When
Mallorca's public holidays work on three different levels, national, regional and local, which is exactly why they catch visitors out. Here's how it actually works.
TRAVEL BLOG
8/27/20264 min read
Public Holidays in Mallorca: The System Nobody Explains Properly
Turn up in a random Mallorcan town on what looks like an ordinary Tuesday, and you might find every shop shut, the streets full of a brass band, and absolutely no explanation anywhere in English. This happens more often than visitors expect, and it's not random. Mallorca's public holidays work on three separate levels at once, and understanding the system, rather than just memorising a list of dates, is what actually stops it catching you out.
Three levels of holiday, not one
This is the bit that trips people up. A "public holiday" in Mallorca can mean one of three genuinely different things:
National holidays, set by the Spanish government, observed the same way across the entire country.
Regional holidays, set by the Balearic government, applying across all four islands but nowhere else in Spain.
Local holidays, chosen individually by each town or village, usually tied to a patron saint, and applying only within that specific municipality.
A day that's a full public holiday in one town can be a completely normal working Tuesday twenty minutes down the road. That's not a quirk, it's just how the system is designed, and it's worth genuinely internalising before you plan a trip around a specific date.
National holidays, the ones that apply everywhere
These are set once nationally and apply the same way whether you're in Mallorca, Madrid or the Canary Islands. The fixed-date ones, the ones that fall on the same date every single year, are:
1 January, New Year's Day
6 January, Epiphany (Reyes)
1 May, Labour Day
15 August, Assumption of the Virgin Mary
12 October, Spain's National Day
1 November, All Saints' Day
6 December, Constitution Day
8 December, Immaculate Conception
25 December, Christmas Day
On top of these, Good Friday is a national holiday every year, but since it's tied to the date of Easter, it moves, landing anywhere from late March to late April depending on the year. If you're travelling around Easter, it's worth checking the actual date for your specific year rather than assuming it lines up with wherever it fell last time you visited.
Regional holidays, unique to the Balearics
The Balearic government adds its own holidays on top of the national ones, applying across Mallorca, Menorca, Ibiza and Formentera, but nowhere else in Spain.
The big one is Dia de les Illes Balears (Day of the Balearic Islands), on 1 March, fixed every year. It's a genuinely proud regional day, marking Balearic self-government, with cultural events and ceremonies across the islands, and it's one of the more distinctly "this is a Balearic thing" dates on the calendar.
Maundy Thursday (Jueves Santo), the Thursday before Easter, is also typically observed as a regional holiday here, again moving with the date of Easter each year, and marked with religious processions in towns across the island.
Local holidays, the ones that actually vary town to town
Every single municipality in Mallorca, from Palma down to the smallest inland village, picks two of its own local holidays each year, almost always tied to a patron saint. This is where the "closed here, open there" confusion really comes from.
A few examples that show how much this varies:
Palma observes Sant Sebastià, on 20 January, the city's patron saint, marked with bonfires and street parties across the old town the night before.
Manacor, Muro and Pollença instead observe Sant Antoni, on 17 January, a date that isn't a holiday at all in Palma.
Many Mallorcan towns, Palma included, also treat 26 December as a de facto local holiday, even though it isn't an official national or regional one, worth knowing if you're travelling right after Christmas.
Beyond these, individual village festival days, like Sineu's own August festival and the Mucada, often coincide with a local holiday for that municipality specifically, even though it's not on any island-wide list.
What actually closes, and what doesn't
On national and regional holidays, expect banks, public offices, and most non-tourist shops and services to be closed, much like a Sunday. On purely local holidays, it's really only that specific town affected, everywhere else carries on as normal.
A few practical exceptions worth knowing:
Tourist resort areas are generally exempt from Sunday and holiday closing rules, so supermarkets and shops in places like Magaluf, Alcúdia or Playa de Palma often stay open even on national holidays, when the same shop in a quieter inland town would be shut.
Restaurants and bars generally stay open on holidays, in fact these are often their busiest days, it's specifically shops, banks and offices that close.
Pharmacies always have a rota system even on full closure days, look for a sign in the window listing the nearest currently open pharmacy (farmacia de guardia) if you need one.
Our guide to the best markets in Mallorca is worth checking too if a market day you're planning around happens to fall on a local holiday elsewhere on the island, timings can shift.
The upside of getting caught out
Here's the honest local take: stumbling into a town on its local holiday isn't actually the disaster it feels like at first. You've usually stumbled into a genuine festa, not a tourist-facing event, brass bands, processions, whole families out on the street together. It's inconvenient if you need a specific shop open, but it's also exactly the kind of unplanned, authentic moment that a lot of visitors come here hoping to find and never quite do. Worth reframing it that way if it happens to you.
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