The best driving roads in Portugal

Ask for the best driving road in Portugal and you will be pointed at the N222 along the Douro, the one a widely quoted study once called the best in the world. It is a lovely drive and the view over the terraces is genuinely worth the trip. It scores 65, and it does not appear anywhere in this list.

The scoring does not read views. It reads corners, hairpins, elevation change and how a road flows, and in Portugal it keeps pointing about a thousand kilometres out into the Atlantic. Six of the fourteen roads below are on Madeira, an island roughly 57 km end to end. The highest scoring road in the whole country, ER103, is one of them. Two more, just outside this list, are in the Azores.

On the mainland the pattern is tighter than you would expect. Almost everything worth driving sits in three places: the Serra da Estrela, where the country’s highest ground is, the hills above the Douro, and a scattering of small ranges around Serra da Lousã. The Algarve, where most visitors drive, contributes nothing to the top of the list.

None of this has to be a trip, though. There are roads worth going out of your way for in every region of Portugal, and the map is built to surface the best one near you before anything else. Most people start with something forty minutes from home rather than a flight to Funchal.

Madeira drives well nearly year round, which is unusual for anywhere this mountainous. The mainland ranges are the opposite: best in late spring and autumn, cold and often fogbound on the tops in winter.

A score tells you what a road is made of, how it corners, how it climbs and how it holds a rhythm. Drivers who have actually been there tell you how it drove. Where enough of them have logged a road, we put that on the road’s own page too.