The best driving roads in Poland

Most of Poland is plain. The land only rises along the southern border, where two mountain systems run along the frontier at opposite ends of it, and every road on this page is in that rim. The Sudetes in the west hold ten of the top twenty, and the Carpathians in the east hold the other ten.

The highest scoring is a stretch of national road 28 between Sanok and Bircza, where it climbs over the Słonne Mountains near Tyrawa Wołoska. Drivers call it the Tyrawa serpentines: 14 hairpins packed into 13.8 km, on what is otherwise a main road between two towns.

The Sudetes half is old. The Road of a Hundred Bends through the Table Mountains, between Kudowa-Zdrój and Radków, is a nineteenth-century road, and the passes around the Kłodzko valley link spa towns that were busy long before anyone drove there for fun. At the far western end, in the Karkonosze, Szosa Czeska is named for where it goes: the Czech border.

The eastern half is wilder. Six of the fourteen are in the far southeast, most of them on the Bieszczady loops, roads that circle a range with more forest than villages. Between the two halves, the Silesian Beskids contribute the climb over Salmopolska Pass from Szczyrk down to Wisła.

For most Poles that rim is a long drive, which is exactly when a map earns its keep. Open it in Warsaw, Poznań or Łódź and the nearest well-scored roads come first, so an evening drive is as easy to plan as a weekend in the mountains.

Autumn is the season people come for in the Bieszczady, when the beech forests turn. It is as good a reason as any to choose a road from this list and go.