The best driving roads in Romania

The Transfăgărășan takes this list at 85, which will surprise nobody. The size of it is less well known: 1,749 metres of climb in one run, the third biggest of any road we have scored anywhere, behind only the Stelvio and the Timmelsjoch. It earns the reputation it has.

Then the list goes quiet. Most of what follows has no name at all, only a county or national road number, and two of those anonymous entries score level with the Transalpina. Nothing signposts them as anything. Nobody has filmed them. They are what the scoring turns up once it stops caring which roads are famous.

All of it sits on the Carpathian arc, which bends through the country like a question mark. Twelve of the top twenty are in the Southern Carpathians, the high wall between Transylvania and the Danube plain. Five are in the Apuseni, lower and more wooded, out west. The remainder are up in the Eastern Carpathians and Maramureș near the Ukrainian border.

Which sounds like it needs a week booked off, and mostly it does not. The Carpathians ring the middle of the country rather than sitting off in one corner, so the cities are arranged around the rim of the good driving instead of far from it. The map sorts by what is near you before it sorts by anything else.

One hard constraint worth planning around: the top of the Transfăgărășan is closed by law for most of the year and opens for a short summer season. None of the rest of this list works that way, which is one of the better arguments for the rest of this list. The Apuseni roads in particular run lower and stay open.

The number on each of these is not an opinion and not a vote. It is what the road’s own shape adds up to, which is how the unnamed ones end up sitting this close to the famous one. Drivers supply the part that is an opinion: mark a road worth it and that lands on its page as well.