Guide
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. These are the most hairpin-dense drives in our catalogue, ranked by the number of true hairpin bends, counted directly from each road’s geometry rather than guessed.
Spiti Valley Road173 mi · 6 h 42 min · 109 hairpinsView the roadbook ›
Hairpins
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109hairpins
Spiti Valley Road
Corners beyond counting, across a cold desert. NH505 threads the Spiti gorge for 275 km, and the sheer accumulation of bends, hundreds of them, as the road follows every fold of the cliff above the turquoise river, is relentless. This is not a single stacked wall of hairpins but an entire valley’s worth of corners strung over days of remote high driving. Much is unpaved. Drive it in the short summer window, in a capable vehicle, and settle into the rhythm of a road that simply never runs straight through one of the emptiest landscapes on earth.
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100hairpinsLeh–Manali Highway
The most corners of any road here, because it is the longest and highest. Four hundred and seventy-nine kilometres over five Himalayan passes means an almost unimaginable tally of bends, the Gata Loops alone stacking twenty-one hairpins in one place, the whole road a two-day accumulation of switchbacks at altitude. If you measure a great driving road by the number of times it asks you to turn, few on earth ask more often. Drive it in summer, acclimatise first, carry spare fuel, and give yourself over to the endless winding of the hardest great road in the world.
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81hairpinsTribhuvan Highway
The switchback king. Nepal’s oldest highway covers just thirty-two kilometres as the crow flies in 107 kilometres of road, a density of hairpins that tops this entire guide, the Rajpath coiling up through forest to the Himalayan grandstand at Daman. This is the purest expression of the form: a road that exists as almost nothing but corners, folding back on itself again and again up the Mahabharata range. Drive it in the clear post-monsoon months, overnight near Daman for the dawn panorama from Dhaulagiri to Everest, and count the bends until you lose track, which you will.
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75hairpinsStelvio Pass
The most famous hairpins in the world, all forty-eight of them numbered. The Stelvio’s Prato side is the definitive switchback staircase, the bends stacked so tightly and signed so clearly that they have become the very image of a mountain pass, counting down as you climb the wall to 2,757 m. It is not the highest count here, but it is the most iconic, the corners every driver pictures when they picture a great road. Climb it from Prato for the full numbered descent above you, drive it early before the crowds, and tick off the forty-eight that made the legend.
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60hairpinsPunta Olímpica
Forty-six hairpins with a mountain for a backdrop. The Sector de las Mil Curvas, the Thousand Curves, climbs the Cordillera Blanca in a relentless stack of switchbacks with Huascarán, Peru’s highest peak, filling the view, before the road bores through the divide at 4,732 m. This is hairpin driving at genuine altitude in the most beautiful mountains in the tropics, the corners coming one after another as the air thins. Drive it in the dry season, take the altitude seriously on the climb, and let the Thousand Curves live up to their name against the white wall of Huascarán.
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50hairpinsColl de Sóller (Ma-11A)
A pass built as pure hairpin, then left to the enthusiasts. Before the tunnel opened in 1997, every car crossing to Sóller had to take this serpentine, and the engineers packed it with more than fifty switchbacks, roughly thirty a side, coiling up through Tramuntana pine. Now bypassed, it belongs to drivers who come for the corners alone. Six miles, fifty-odd hairpins, one of the densest concentrations of switchbacks in Europe on beautiful old Mallorcan stone-walled tarmac. Drive it early before the cyclists arrive, take the tight bends with respect, and enjoy a road that exists now almost purely for the joy of it.
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44hairpinsCol de la Lombarde
An almost unbroken ladder to the frontier. From the Isola 2000 ski resort the M97 corkscrews up bare high alpine terrain to a 2,351 m border saddle in a near-continuous chain of hairpins, then descends into Italy down the wild Stura di Demonte valley. It is celebrated precisely for that relentlessness, the way the switchbacks pile on top of one another with barely a straight between them. High, remote and gloriously twisty. Drive it up from Isola in summer or autumn when the pass is clear, cross into Italy for the descent, and enjoy one of the Maritime Alps' most concentrated hairpin climbs.
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41hairpinsSichuan–Tibet Highway
Switchbacks onto the roof of the world. This section of G318 opens with twenty-one hairpins climbing from Kangding to the Zheduo Pass at 4,298 m, and the corners keep coming across the plateau to Litang, a road that turns and turns as it hauls itself onto the Tibetan tableland. The hairpins here are the mechanism by which you gain a civilisation’s worth of altitude in a day. Drive it acclimatised, in the warmer months, savour the poplar valley of Xinduqiao below the pass, and take the great switchback climb onto the plateau at the measured pace the altitude demands.
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41hairpinsBabusar Pass
One of the most hairpinned roads in the world, climbing into thin bright air. The N-15 stacks relentless switchbacks from the Kaghan Valley resort of Naran up to Babusar Pass at 4,173 m, the highest paved point in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, where the meadows open onto an unobstructed view of Nanga Parbat. The corners are the means of ascent, folding the road up the mountainside toward the summit plateau. Open only in the short summer. Drive it on a clear day for the Nanga Parbat panorama, mind the altitude at the top, and enjoy one of Pakistan’s great switchback climbs.
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40hairpinsTsugaru Iwaki Skyline
Sixty-nine hairpins, and nothing else. Japan does the pure hairpin road better than anyone, and the Tsugaru Iwaki Skyline is the distilled example: a private toll road that corkscrews roughly ten kilometres up the flank of Mount Iwaki, the Tsugaru Fuji, in sixty-nine numbered switchbacks, each one signed, delivering you to the eighth station where a chairlift takes over. It is barely six miles long and it is almost entirely corners. Drive it up the beech-forested mountain, count the numbered bends as they come, and enjoy one of the most relentlessly switchbacked roads on earth for the sheer joy of the turning.
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39hairpinsSiddhartha Highway
Corners piled on corners through the Nepali hills. The Siddhartha Highway plunges from Pokhara into the green Mahabharata range in a relentless sequence of hairpins, over seven hundred of them, past jungle slopes and rice terraces to the walled town of Tansen and on toward the plains. The Butwal-to-Palpa section is the most testing, tight and rocky and rockfall-prone. This is a road defined by the density of its bends, one of the most switchbacked highways in a country full of them. Drive it in the dry months, break the journey at Tansen, and mind the rockfall on the endlessly winding Palpa descent.
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38hairpinsCol de Braus
A perfect hairpin staircase in full view. The D2204's L’Escarène side is the draw, a famous run of tightly piled switchbacks coiling up the hillside where you can see the whole ladder at once, long a fixture of the Monte Carlo Rally behind the Riviera. It crests the 1,002 m Col de Braus and drops to Sospel, but the corners on the way up are the point, the kind of stacked hairpins that photographers and rally fans return to again and again. Drive it up from L’Escarène for the classic view of the road below you, and take the famous bends the way the rally cars do.
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38hairpinsAbano Pass
One of the world’s most extreme mountain drives: an entirely unpaved Soviet-era track climbing to 2,826 m with no guardrails, opening the ancient highland province of Tusheti for about 16 weeks a year.
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36hairpinsVršič Pass
Fifty cobbled hairpins over the Julian Alps.
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36hairpinsLangada Pass
Sparta to Kalamata over the Taygetus range, topping out near 1,300 metres.
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36hairpinsDuku Highway
The Duku Highway (G217) crosses the Tianshan Mountains through 561 km of staggering variety, carving through deep river gorges, alpine meadows, desert ridges and snow peaks in a single drive widely called China’s most scenic highway.
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35hairpinsKhardung La
From Leh it climbs 40 km to a summit at 5,359 m, tarmac to South Pullu and loose gravel near the top, then drops off the Ladakh Range into the sand-dune wilderness of Nubra.
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33hairpinsPasso delle Erbe (Würzjoch)
Quiet high Dolomites pass under the Sass de Putia north face.
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33hairpinsPasso di Croce Domini
Narrow high pass linking three Brescian valleys in the Adamello foothills.
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33hairpinsTongtian 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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32hairpinsPasso Giau
A wild, hairpin-stacked Dolomites pass above Cortina.
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32hairpinsSan Bernardino Pass
An old Alpine crossing beside its motorway tunnel.
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31hairpinsCol de la Bonette
The summit isn’t a col so much as a loop, the tarmac circling right around the Cime de la Bonette at 2,802 metres.
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31hairpinsRoute de Cilaos
Réunion’s most implausible feat of road engineering: 35 km of switchbacks, around 400 bends and three single-lane tunnels blasted through vertical volcanic cliffs to reach the isolated Cirque de Cilaos, accessible only by trail until 1932.
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31hairpinsThrumshing La Road
The Lateral Road over Thrumshing La, at 3,780 m the second-highest pass in Bhutan, falling more than 3,000 m down a wall of cliff-hugging switchbacks from alpine forest into subtropical valleys.
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30hairpinsCol de la Madeleine
A long, relentless Tarentaise–Maurienne climb.
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30hairpinsNockalm Road
A 34 km toll road swinging over the soft, grass-domed Nockberge, cresting around 2,042 m.
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29hairpinsChele La
At 3,988 m, the Chele La is the highest motorable pass in Bhutan, carrying the road over the ridge between the Paro valley and the remote Haa valley, with views of Jomolhari on clear days.
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28hairpinsGrossglockner High Alpine Road
Austria’s grand toll road, sweeping past glaciers to 2,500 m.
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28hairpinsCol d'Izoard
A legendary Tour de France climb through the Casse Déserte.
Common questions
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