The best driving roads in Croatia

A typical scored road in Croatia gains a little over a hundred metres between one end and the other. The road at the top of this page gains 1,137 metres. That gap is the whole point: the driving here is not the coastal highway everybody arrives on, it is the roads that leave it and go up.

The Velebit is the obvious place to look for that. It is a limestone ridge about 145 km long standing directly behind the shore, and it supplies three of the top twenty here. Rather fewer than the mountain deserves, and the reason is underfoot: a good deal of what climbs the Velebit is gravel.

The rest divides between the Dalmatian hills further south, where the climbs are shortest and steepest, and the inland north: Gorski kotar, the Zagorje hills above Zagreb, and one road out east in Slavonia that has no business being as good as it is. Those are green, wooded and nothing like the coast.

That northern half is most of this page, and it is also where most of the country actually lives. Zagreb is an hour from the Žumberak and Zagorje roads on this list, which is not the part of Croatia anybody is sold. The map is built to lead with what is good near you rather than what is good in the abstract, and in Croatia those two answers are unusually far apart.

Season works differently here than on the alpine pages. Very little of this closes for snow. What it gets instead is wind: the winter bura comes off the ridge hard enough to shut roads along this coast, and it arrives on clear days rather than bad ones. Spring and autumn are the good windows, and summer on the coastal climbs means traffic rather than weather.

None of these positions were chosen. They fall out of the same measurement applied everywhere: how many times a road turns, how tightly, and how far it rises between its ends. That is why roads carrying nothing but a number finish above the drive that put the country on postcards, and why the order has no favourites to protect. What comes out of it is fourteen roads that score higher than anything else we have measured in Croatia. The measuring is done. Pick one and go and drive it, or ride it.