Es Pontàs
Interesting facts
- Chris Sharma needed almost 50 attempts, each failure ending with a long fall into the sea, before completing Es Pontàs on 26 September 2006.
- The crux is a leap of about seven feet between holds, made some 35 feet above the water with nothing but the sea to catch a miss.
- The 20-metre route follows the arch from its base right up to its apex, hanging steeply overhead almost the whole way.
- Sharma's earlier line Pontax, climbed in November 2005 and graded 8c, shares the route but escapes seaward at the crux leap.
- Nobody repeated Es Pontàs for a decade, until the Slovenian Jernej Kruder succeeded in November 2016 after a month of attempts alongside Jan Hojer.
- By late 2025 only nine climbers had repeated the route, among them Jakob Schubert in 2021.
- The arch's first climbing routes, modest lines graded 6a+ and 6b, appeared around 2003, before anyone imagined the hard line through its roof.
Why it is worth it
Es Pontàs — "the big bridge" in Catalan — is a limestone sea arch on the south-east coast of Mallorca, standing free in the water a short way off the cliffs between Cala Santanyí and Cala Llombards. About twenty metres high, it looks like a doorway left standing after the rest of the house has fallen into the sea: a thick slab of pale rock resting on two legs, with open water on both sides and the Mediterranean shining through the gap. It is what remains of a stretch of coastline that the waves have gradually hollowed out, the same process that carved the deep, narrow calas all along this part of the island.
The best way to enjoy it is from the cliff-top viewpoint above, the Mirador d'Es Pontàs, where the arch is framed against the open sea. It is especially beautiful early and late in the day, when low sunlight turns the limestone gold and the water beneath shifts from turquoise to deep blue. From the land it can only be looked at; reaching the arch itself means coming by water, swimming or by boat.
Es Pontàs also holds a special place in the history of climbing. In 2006 the American climber Chris Sharma made the first ascent of a route up the underside of the arch — climbing without ropes above deep water, the style known as deep-water soloing, where the sea is the only protection against a fall. He named the route Es Pontàs; never formally graded, but widely put at around 9a+, it was the first deep-water solo at that level of difficulty, at the time among a handful of the hardest climbs on Earth of any kind; a year earlier he had already opened a hard line here called Pontax. The ascent was captured in the 2007 film King Lines, and it made this quiet stretch of Mallorcan coast famous far beyond the island.
Getting there
Es Pontàs lies in the municipality of Santanyí, close to Cala Santanyí; Felanitx is about 16 km away. Palma de Mallorca Airport (PMI) is about 43 km away in a straight line. The viewpoint above the arch is reached on foot from the coast near Cala Santanyí; the arch itself is accessible only from the water.
Plan your visit
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Nearby places
- Caló d'es Moro 2.4 km · beach
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From the encyclopaedia
Es Pontàs is a natural arch made from limestone in the southeastern part of the island of Mallorca in Spain. The arch is located on the coastline between the Cala Santanyí and Cala Llombards in the municipality of Santanyí, and is approximately 20 metres (66 ft) in height. Es Pontàs is only accessible by boat or by swimming, and is a popular scenic location for tourists to Mallorca who view it from the 'Mirador Es Pontas'.
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