Guides
Driving guides
Each guide is a numbered list of roads that fit one idea, such as the highest passes or the best coast roads, with a short write-up on every road.
Guide · 30 roads ranked
The highest paved roads in the world
The highest paved roads on earth are a category of their own: thin air, snow banks into summer, and a road that climbs until the view falls away on every side.
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Guide · 30 roads ranked
The best driving roads in the Alps
The Alps have more great driving in one place than any other range.
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Guide · 30 roads ranked
The best driving roads in the Balkans
The Balkans hold some of Europe’s last quiet driving.
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Guide · 24 roads ranked
The best driving roads in the Dolomites
Nowhere else in Europe packs this much good road into this little space.
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Guide · 17 roads ranked
The best driving roads in the Pyrenees
The Pyrenees are a little lower than the Alps, just as steep and far quieter, with a border that means you can start the morning in France and have lunch in Spain.
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Guide · 30 roads ranked
The best driving roads in France
France has the Alps down one flank and the Pyrenees along the other, the Massif Central in the middle and the Riviera underneath, and it paved all of them properly.
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Guide · 30 roads ranked
The best driving roads in Italy
Italy has glacier passes in the north, the Dolomite hairpins and a cliff road along the Amalfi Coast, and then Sardinia and Sicily on top.
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Guide · 30 roads ranked
The best driving roads in Spain and Portugal
Iberia has empty tarmac, cheaper fuel than most of Europe, and a peninsula that runs from Atlantic cliffs through high meseta to the Mediterranean, with the Canaries and the Balearics thrown in.
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Guide · 29 roads ranked
The best driving roads in Japan
Japan’s best drives are mostly skylines, ridge-top toll roads that run for miles above the treeline, plus volcano crossings through steaming sulphur and the tolled climbs that carry you a good way up Fuji before the tarmac gives out.
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Guide · 30 roads ranked
The best driving roads in Scandinavia and the Nordics
Norway alone has fjord ferries, glacier passes and the high plateau of the Hardangervidda, with Iceland’s volcanic ring road and the empty sweeps of Arctic Sweden close behind.
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Guide · 18 roads ranked
The best driving roads in South America
The Andes have some of the highest paved passes anywhere, Patagonia hides the Carretera Austral among its fjords and ice, and the switchbacks of Los Caracoles and the Trampolín de la Muerte are famous with drivers.
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Guide · 10 roads ranked
The best driving roads in Southeast Asia
Southeast Asia’s best roads run through jungle, rice terraces and limestone karst.
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Guide · 13 roads ranked
The best driving roads in the Himalayas
The Himalaya and Karakoram hold the highest drivable roads on earth.
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Guide · 30 roads ranked
The best coastal drives in the world
A good coast road has the sea on one side and the land dropping into it on the other.
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Guide · 30 roads ranked
The longest great driving roads in the world
These are the longest single drives in our catalogue, the routes that fill a day or run into the next, ranked by distance.
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Guide · 30 roads ranked
The world’s most hair-raising hairpin roads
A hairpin is the purest test of a road and a driver: full lock, a held breath, then the next one.
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Guide · 30 roads ranked
The best driving roads in the world
This list runs from the Bealach na Bà to the Leh–Manali Highway and the Pamir Highway, which are closer to expeditions than drives.
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Guide · 30 roads ranked
The best driving roads in Europe
Roughly two-thirds of the catalogue is European: Alpine passes stacked with hairpins, Highland single-tracks, fjord roads that end at the water.
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Guide · 30 roads ranked
The best driving roads in the UK
Britain’s best roads are a particular pleasure: narrow, old, draped over the landscape rather than carved through it.
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Guide · 30 roads ranked
The best driving roads in America
American roads come big: a coast road that runs for a hundred miles, a mountain pass that takes all morning, a desert highway with nothing else in sight.
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Guide · 30 roads ranked
The highest roads in Europe
Europe’s highest roads run above the treeline, where the air thins, the guardrails thin out and the season lasts about four months.
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Guide · 30 roads ranked
The steepest roads you can drive
Steepness changes a road completely: first gear, a hot clutch and a windscreen full of sky.
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Guide · 30 roads ranked
Great driving roads you can drive in winter
Winter shuts the high passes, but it does not end the driving year.
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