Weather in Palma in May

Prime time. May is about as good as Palma gets. Highs average 20.3 °C, lows 16.9 °C, and rain falls on 6 days — nothing in the month is working against you.

May ranks 3 of 12 in Palma. Only June scores clearly higher, and the difference is small enough to be settled by price rather than weather.

Rain falls on only 6 days, so an itinerary with no wet-weather fallback is a reasonable risk. Nothing specialised needed — this is the month you pack for the trip rather than for the weather.

What the averages hide

Averages flatten a month, and this one hides a few things: it never really gets hot: not one day in an average May reaches 30 °C; the day barely swings — 3.3 °C between the overnight low and the afternoon high. Across the twenty years measured, the hottest May day reached 27.4 °C and the coldest night fell to 11.6 °C, and the wettest single day dropped 65 mm — roughly 176% of the month's rain in one day.

This is the volatile part. May rainfall has ranged from 6 mm to 130 mm across the twenty years measured — a 124 mm spread around an average of 37 mm. The average is real but almost no individual May looks like it, so treat the figure as the middle of a wide range rather than a forecast.

Wind is light at 12.6 km/h, so the temperature on the page is close to the temperature on your skin, and humidity runs at 75%, high enough to notice on the warm days without dominating them.

How May sits in the year

The month is on the way up: 3.1 °C warmer than April, and June adds another 4.5 °C. Late in the month feels noticeably different from the start of it, which is worth knowing if the trip is short.

Daylight in May

May is at or near the longest days of Palma's year: 14.3 hours of daylight, gaining 0.9 hours across the month. Evenings are the real gain — dinner outdoors still happens in full light.

Sea temperature

The sea sits at about 17.9 °C in May — cold — a quick dip rather than a swim, and a wetsuit if you are in for longer. The sea peaks at 26.3 °C in August and bottoms out at 13.5 °C — water lags the air by a month or two, which is why the best swimming often comes after the best weather.

How busy it gets

Busy. Popular without being frantic; book the things you care about, improvise the rest.

Crowd levels are estimated from climate desirability and school-holiday calendars, not from visitor numbers.

May in Palma versus nearby

If Palma is one option among several, the nearby comparison is worth making. Barcelona is close enough to be a coin toss — 4.4 °C warmer, 2 days more rain. Valencia is close enough to be a coin toss — 6.7 °C warmer, the same number of rain days.

So: May is effectively as good as it gets here — 6 points behind June, which is inside the margin where the weather stops being the deciding factor and price starts being it.

Every month in Palma

See all twelve months in Palma, or where else to go in May.