Getting around PMI
Aena puts Palma de Mallorca Airport eight kilometres from the city and calls it the gateway for the millions of tourists who visit the island — and then says outright what the airport’s own history explains: traffic is primarily international and reaches its greatest levels during the summer season, with Germany sending more passengers than any other nationality, ahead of Spain and the United Kingdom. That seasonal swing is built into a single terminal building, opened in 1997 and designed by the Majorcan architect Pere Nicolau Bonet, in front of which stands a dedicated car park building. Boarding happens across four modules, A through D, all entered from the fourth floor after security, Module B included — a separate building opened in April 2003 specifically for inter-island and short-haul flights, whose ground floor is the boarding area and whose upper-floor observation balcony is reached from the main check-in area over an airbridge. Commercial aviation here traces back to 1921, when a seaplane postal line from Barcelona landed in the port of Palma, decades before Son Sant Joan itself opened to traffic in 1960. In 2025 Aena recorded 33,806,427 passengers, 246,486 operations and 5,836 tonnes of cargo; a year earlier, ACI had already named Palma the best airport in Europe for its size category.
