The world's most spectacular roads

Some roads are a way to get somewhere. A handful are the somewhere. I've spent a few years chasing that second kind — the ones where you set off without much caring what's at the far end, because the far end isn't the point. The point is the next bend, and the one after that, each one opening onto a view you'd have paid to see and instead just drove into by accident.

This isn't a ranking. It's a shortlist of the roads that made me pull over more times than my schedule could afford, scribbled from memory and a camera roll that's mostly guardrails and horizon. A warning up front: half of what makes these roads magic — the weather, the light, whether the pass is even open — changes by the month. So I'll tell you what I saw, and flag what shifts.

Where the sea does the heavy lifting

Australia's Great Ocean Road spoiled me early. You trace the southern coast of Victoria with the Southern Ocean throwing itself at the cliffs on your right, and then the Twelve Apostles appear — limestone stacks standing off the shore like the land changed its mind. I learned the hard way that they're best at the soft end of the day rather than flat noon, so I doubled back for the evening light, and the whole car park was doing the same. One honest note: it's left-hand driving down there, and the bends near the coast reward patience over pace.

Italy's Amalfi Coast is the same idea with the volume turned all the way up. The road clings to the cliff above the Tyrrhenian, lemon groves on one shoulder and a drop to turquoise on the other, threading through Positano and Ravello on lanes that were clearly designed for donkeys. It is breathtaking and it is slow, and in high summer it is both at once, in traffic. South Africa's Garden Route is gentler — the stretch east of Cape Town where forest, lagoon and coastline take turns — and it's the one I'd hand a nervous first-timer.

« The best roads don't take you to a view. They are the view, one bend at a time. »

Here's where a connection quietly earns its keep, and I'll keep it honest because these are the places it matters most. On all of these, the showstopper viewpoints, the mountain weather and the seasonal road status live behind a signal — and that signal vanishes the moment you leave the towns. I keep an offline map of the whole route downloaded before I start, so the blue dot still works in the blank spots, and I check the forecast and any closures while I've still got bars. A fair point for European travellers: if your home plan is already an EU/EEA one, roam-like-at-home follows you around Europe, so the Amalfi Coast is covered the way home is. Outside that — Australia, South Africa, anywhere your plan doesn't reach — I sort a local eSIM before I fly, so the map and the weather work from the first lay-by.

Where the mountain does it instead

Norway is, I think, the purest version of this. Trollstigen folds back on itself in eleven hairpins up a cliff face with a waterfall crashing alongside, and it's a seasonal road — it opens when the snow clears, usually late spring, and shuts again for winter, so you check before you point the car at it. Down at sea level, the Atlantic Ocean Road does the opposite trick, hopping between tiny islands on low bridges that look, from the right angle, like the tarmac is about to launch you off the edge; calm days are serene, but when the Atlantic is in a mood the waves come over the road, and that's the photo everyone wants. Romania's Transfăgărășan belongs here too, with the firmest caveat of the lot: it climbs through the Carpathians in a tangle of switchbacks, and it is only open in summer — roughly late June or July through autumn, depending on the snow that year — so turn up in spring and you'll find a gate, not a road. And then there's Iceland's Ring Road, Route 1, looping the whole island for around 1,300 kilometres past waterfalls and black beaches and glaciers, open all the way round in summer but with stretches that close fast once winter starts editing the map.

The myth that's mostly a memory

I have to be straight about Route 66, because the dream and the reality have drifted apart. The old Chicago-to-Santa-Monica route was officially decommissioned decades ago, swallowed in places by the interstates that replaced it. What's left today is fragmented — glorious, preserved chunks of neon and desert and diner Americana you stitch together with detours, rather than one unbroken ribbon. It's still worth doing. Just go knowing you're driving a memory, with gaps, not a single highway. Maui's Hana Highway is the small, intact opposite: a short, jungle-tunnelled road of around six hundred curves and one-lane bridges where, again, the journey flatly outvotes the destination.

What to remember

Pick the road, not the destination, and let it set the pace — half the joy of these is the permission to stop. Drive them for the conditions in front of you, not the schedule behind you: a hairpin in fog, a coast road at the wrong hour, a pass that's closed for the season are all part of the deal, and checking before you go saves the day. Bring the signal to plan and the discipline to put the phone down at the lay-by. The bend will still be there. So will you.

— Hugo, still counting hairpins.