The best driving roads in Austria

Hochalpenstraße. Gletscherstraße. Panoramastraße. Höhenstraße. Austria has a whole vocabulary for roads built to be driven rather than roads that merely had to get somewhere, and it turns up right at the top of this list. Großglockner Hochalpenstraße leads at 82, and the road directly behind it is a glacier road, named for precisely what it is. The Silvretta Hochalpenstraße over the Bielerhöhe matches it on score and is missing here for a duller reason: its northern side is closed to through traffic.

That brings something you will not meet in France or Spain. Several of the best roads here are privately built and privately run: a barrier at the bottom, a price to lift it, and an hour in the evening after which nobody is going up. The highest of them are under snow for about half the year. None of that is a catch, it is simply how the country does mountain roads, and it is worth knowing before driving four hours to a closed gate.

The second surprise is where they are. Ask anyone to picture Austrian mountain driving and they will hand you Tyrol, perhaps Vorarlberg. Those two provinces hold five of the highest twenty. Carinthia and Styria hold ten, out in the southeast along and above the Slovenian border, where the passes run lower, greener, and almost completely unbothered by anyone planning a trip.

Austria is also small enough to make this page unusual: the whole list is a long weekend, so for once you could drive the top of an entire country in one go. It cuts the other way too. Nothing here is far from anywhere, and the map still opens on the good driving within reach of you first, which in a country this size is very often the same thing.

Nobody hands out these numbers. Each one falls out of the road’s own geometry, which is how an unmarketed pass on the Slovenian border ends up ahead of one with a ticket booth at the bottom. Drivers then add their own verdict: mark a road worth it and it shows up on its page, next to the number.