Guide
The best driving roads in the world
Every list of the world’s best driving roads ends in an argument, so here is mine, with its reasoning on the table. These thirty are drawn from a catalogue of 732 roads across 85 countries, every one mapped from its real geometry and fact-checked by hand. It’s my ranking: the icons every driver should meet once lead, and the rest is judgement, with each road’s measured stats on the table.
Bealach na Bà7 mi · 18 min · 626 m summitView the roadbook ›
Why it makes the list
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1
7 mi18 min
Bealach na Bà
On a list full of five-thousand-metre passes, a single-track Scottish road to 626 m has no statistical right to be here. It is here anyway, and it goes first, because greatness is not altitude. The Pass of the Cattle climbs out of Loch Kishorn in exposed alpine hairpins, 1-in-5 at the steepest, passing places doing the work of two lanes, and tips you over the top to a panorama across the sea to Skye that stops conversations. Then it drops you into Applecross, where the inn is waiting. Weather is the gatekeeper and snow can close it; give way with good grace and take the whole thing slowly. Every list we make starts here, and we stand by it.
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2
10 mi20 minSnaefell Mountain Road
The mountain section of the TT course, and the fastest legal road experience in these islands: parts of the A18 over Snaefell carry no general speed limit at all. That is not the invitation it sounds like. The moorland is bare, the fog arrives without notice, the sweepers are faster than they look, and the road demands the same respect the racers give it. Get a clear morning and it is sublime: flowing tarmac over the roof of the Isle of Man, the sea on every side, the ghosts of a hundred and twenty years of racing in the hedgeless margins. It closes for the TT itself, which is exactly when you should be there anyway, standing at the hedge instead.
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3
5,332 msummitLeh–Manali Highway
Not a drive, an expedition: 479 km and five Himalayan passes, much of it above 4,000 m, from the green Kullu valley to the moonscape of Ladakh. Rohtang is the warm-up; Baralacha La, Lachulung La and finally Tanglang La at 5,328 m are the main event, with unpaved stretches, water crossings and an average altitude that makes acclimatisation part of the route plan. It is open roughly May to mid-October and demands a prepared vehicle, spare fuel and humility. What you get back is the Indian Himalaya at its most savage and beautiful, a two-day traverse where the road itself is the destination. The hardest drive on this list, and for the right driver the greatest.
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4
4,275 msummitPamir Highway
The M41 is overland legend: a Soviet-built ribbon across the roof of Central Asia, cresting Ak-Baital at 4,655 m between Khorog and the high town of Murghab. The surface is broken, the fuel stops are two hundred kilometres apart, the cold bites even in August, and the plateau it crosses looks borrowed from another planet, turquoise lakes stark against brown steppe. This is the least polished road on this list and among the most affecting: hours pass without another vehicle, and the emptiness is the point. Take spares, take cash, take time. Summer and early autumn only, and treat the altitude with the seriousness it demands.
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5
4,181 msummitCuesta de Lipán
The perfect engineered climb: dozens of paved switchbacks rising from the painted village of Purmamarca to Abra de Potrerillos at 4,170 m, with a viewpoint below the summit where the whole serpentine lays itself out for inspection. Then the reveal on the far side, the Salinas Grandes salt flat, dead white to the horizon with vicuñas drifting across the road. It is the most accessible of South America’s great altitude drives, tarmac all the way, but 4,000 m is 4,000 m: take the altitude seriously, watch for fog and trucks, and go in the dry seasons. The pairing of technicolour quebrada below and blinding salt above has no equal anywhere on this list.
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6
3,236 msummitLos Caracoles
South America’s most famous mountain crossing: the switchback stack of Los Caracoles clawing up a near-vertical Andean canyon from the Aconcagua valley toward the Cristo Redentor tunnel and the Argentine border at around 3,200 m. Drive it ascending, as the catalogue maps it, so the hairpins stack above you and the canyon walls do their work; the descent is for the trucks, of which there are many, this being one of the continent’s great freight arteries. Winter brings snow, ice and border closures, so time it for the warm half of the year. The Andes have higher roads, but none where the engineering and the geology argue this loudly in so short a distance.
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7
2,876 msummitSani Pass
The mother of all South African passes: a 4x4-only gravel ladder up the Drakensberg wall into Lesotho, thirteen hairpins, gradients to 1-in-3, and the highest pub in Africa pouring at the top. The climb gains 1,300 m out of the Mkhomazana valley, each bend tightening until the last few demand three-point turns in anything long, and the drops are the honest, unbarriered kind. Snow is possible at the summit in any month, the border post keeps office hours, and rain turns the ruts serious. Take low range, take your time, and have the beer at the top before the descent asks for everything again in reverse. There are higher passes in this guide, but none with a better finish line.
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8
2,865 msummitAbano Pass
Sixteen weeks a year, a bulldozer permitting, you can drive an entirely unpaved Soviet-era track to a medieval highland where stone defensive towers still stand watch. The Abano Pass road climbs from the Alazani valley to 2,826 m with no tarmac, no guardrails and no negotiating position against the weather, then drops into Tusheti, one of Europe’s last genuinely remote inhabited landscapes. It is regularly ranked among the world’s most dangerous roads, which slightly misses the point: driven dry, in a proper 4WD, with patience at the fords, it is less a stunt than a privilege. Late June to early October only. The reward is not the road, it is where the road goes.
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9
2,766 msummitTrampolín de la Muerte
The name translates as the Trampoline of Death and the road does not argue. Seventy-five kilometres of single-lane gravel shelf between San Francisco and Mocoa, hung over Colombian cloud-forest cliffs, 270-degree switchbacks, waterfalls crossing the carriageway, and fog that erases the edge you already could not afford to find. One night of rain can close it for days, so it is a dry-weather road driven slowly, with lights on and nerve steady, giving way to the trucks that use it because there is no other road. It earns its place here the hard way: as an experience of driving at its most elemental, in scenery that would be worth the journey even if the journey were easy. It is not.
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10
2,580 msummitDerebaşı Bends
Built by hand in 1916 and barely changed since: thirteen guardrail-free hairpins stacked up a sheer Pontic mountainside, drops of hundreds of metres, gradients to 17 per cent, mixed asphalt and gravel, open barely four months a year between the snows. The Derebaşı bends are the centrepiece of the D915 from the Black Sea to Bayburt over the Soğanlı Pass, and they are Turkey’s most extreme road by any measure that matters. Drive it in high summer, in the dry, uphill for preference, and expect to meet a truck exactly where you would rather not. It is short on comfort and long on consequence, and as a pure test of nerve nothing else on this list comes close except the Trampolín.
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11
2,528 msummitTeide Caldera Traverse
The gentlest road in this guide’s top dozen, and it concedes nothing in spectacle. The TF-21 climbs from Vilaflor, Spain’s highest village, through old Canarian pine into the caldera of a supervolcano, then runs mile after mile across rust-red lava with Teide’s 3,715 m cone owning the sky. It is open all year, beautifully surfaced and driveable in anything, which makes it the most accessible entry point to otherworldly driving that exists: two hours from a beach holiday to another planet. Winter can ice the summit stretch and cloud moves fast across the caldera rim. Go at golden hour, when the lava fields catch fire and the tour buses have gone down.
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12
2,141 msummitTizi n'Test
The old road over the western High Atlas, single-track in its wildest stretch, carved into cliffs above a void that reaches five hundred metres with nothing between you and it. From Asni it climbs the olive terraces of the Nfiss past the 12th-century Tin Mal mosque, then earns its reputation on the ledge before the 2,093 m summit, where the Anti-Atlas and the Souss valley open up together. The descent to Taroudant drops 1,600 m into citrus groves. Daylight only, dry conditions only, horn before the blind stone corners, and let the grand taxis have their line. It is intimidating and it is magnificent, usually in the same minute, and it is the best road in North Africa.
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13
1,987 msummitAl Hada Escarpment Road
Ninety-three bends down the Hejaz escarpment, dropping 1,300 m from the cool of the Al Hada plateau toward the heat haze of the Tihamah plain, with baboons supervising from the barriers. It is dual-carriageway and beautifully surfaced, which changes the game entirely: this is the one road on this list’s wilder half where the driving is pure pleasure rather than pure management, position and anticipation through an unbroken cascade of hairpins. Fog sits on the top bends in the cool months, trucks and buses grind between Taif and Mecca at all hours, and summer heat rewrites the rules. Go in winter, go at dawn, and count the bends on the way down; everyone loses track somewhere in the sixties.
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14
1,822 msummitSpreetshoogte Pass
Namibia’s steepest pass, and the great southern African viewpoint drive: the gravel road tips off the Khomas Hochland escarpment and falls toward the Namib in ramps that reach 1-in-4.5, the desert floor a thousand metres below stretching to the dunes on a clear day. It is short, it is low-range 4x4 territory on the steep pitches, and it is best driven downhill in the late afternoon when the light turns the plains to copper. Corrugations and loose gravel are the price of admission, as ever in Namibia. Combine it with the long empty roads of the Khomas and you have one of the great desert driving days on earth, ending at one of its great sunsets.
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15
1,451 msummitMae Hong Son Loop
Thailand’s most celebrated mountain highway runs 245 km from Chiang Mai to Mae Hong Son via Pai, through remote hill-tribe country on continuous switchbacks.
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16
1,409 msummitSerra do Rio do Rastro
Brazil’s most celebrated driving road: a wall of stacked hairpin bends scaling the Serra Geral escarpment through Atlantic Forest, rising 944 m from the coastal plain to the high plateau, the country’s answer to the Stelvio.
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17
1,048 msummitJebel Hafeet
One of the world’s great driving roads, a purpose-built 12 km spiral up the flanks of Jebel Hafeet with over 60 sweeping turns, rising 670 m from the desert floor to the summit of Abu Dhabi’s highest mountain.
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18
1,029 msummitOrientale Sarda
Often called the best driving road in the world, 50 km through the limestone Supramonte above the Gulf of Orosei on near-perfect asphalt, over a succession of named mountain passes.
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19
7 mi18 minTongtian Avenue
Tongtian Avenue, the Road to Heaven, climbs 11 km up the sheer face of Tianmen Mountain through its famous 99 bends, rising 1,100 m to a natural rock arch at 1,300 m.
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20
157 mi5 h 30 minKarakoram Highway
The highest paved border crossing on the planet, and the only road where the Himalaya, Karakoram and Hindu Kush stand in the same windscreen. From Gilgit the highway threads the Hunza gorge beneath Rakaposhi, past the Passu Cones, to the Khunjerab Pass at 4,693 m on the Chinese frontier. Sheer rock on one side, the river far below on the other, and engineering that still reads as defiance. It is open April to November, landslides and rockfall are facts of life rather than hazards, and the altitude at the pass is genuinely high. Go slowly, stop often, and accept that no photograph has ever done the Hunza valley justice. Few drives on earth pack in this much mountain per mile.
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21
4,120 msummitSanetti Plateau Road
The highest all-weather road in Africa, climbing onto the Sanetti Plateau above 4,100 m before dropping the Harenna Escarpment in a long sequence of bends, a 2,000 m descent from Afro-alpine moorland into cloud forest.
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22
11 mi25 minTaroko Gorge Central Cross-Island
A road threaded through a marble canyon: tunnels, overhangs and cliff galleries stacked above the Liwu River.
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23
2,017 msummitTransfăgărășan
A theatrical stack of hairpins carved across the Făgăraș, climbing from Cârțișoara to Bâlea Lac at over 2,000 metres, with a high-summer-only window to catch it open.
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24
1,183 msummitRoute Napoléon (Grasse to Castellane)
The most renowned stretch of the historic Route Napoléon, sweeping from the perfume town of Grasse up into the Provençal Alps.
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25
14 mi31 minGeiranger Eagle Road
Eleven hairpins above one of the world’s great fjords.
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26
2,507 msummitGrossglockner High Alpine Road
Austria’s grand toll road, sweeping past glaciers to 2,500 m.
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27
1,865 msummitZion–Mount Carmel Highway
Switchbacks and a famous tunnel through Zion’s red-rock canyons.
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28
1,175 msummitMount Haruna (Akina) Pass
The Ikaho to Lake Haruna climb that inspired Initial D’s Mount Akina, the most mythologised touge in Japanese car culture.
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29
7 mi17 minConor Pass
The R560 crosses from Dingle to Cloghane in 7.3 miles, a narrow mountain road that tops out at 456 m with passing places for oncoming cars.
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30
20 mi36 minSouth Coast at Vík
Paved Ring Road run past waterfalls to black beaches.
Common questions
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