The best driving roads in Slovenia

There are 1,971 scored roads in Slovenia covering 7,284 km, which is less than a tenth of what Spain has and a twenty-fifth of France. It should not be competitive. Prelaz Vršič scores 89 anyway, and no country on this map except Italy and France has a road that scores higher.

It gets there the honest way. 45 hairpins in 25.1 km, numbered on stones at the roadside as you climb, and a thousand metres of height between the bottom and the top. There is no trick in the number: it is simply a road that does more per kilometre than almost anything else we have measured.

Behind it the country divides into three, and they are nothing like each other. Eleven of the first twenty sit in the Julian Alps and the Soča valley in the northwest, the postcard half. Six sit east under Pohorje and along the Austrian border, lower and greener. The rest run south into the Karst, limestone country where the roads bend around sinkholes rather than mountains.

The useful part of a country this size is that none of those three is far from the others, or from you. Two hours of driving covers most of Slovenia, so the question is rarely which region to commit to. The map opens on whatever is good within reach of where you are standing, and here that is usually a real choice rather than a single option.

Vršič itself shuts under snow through the winter and is a late spring to autumn road. Almost nothing else on this list is: the eastern and Karst roads run low enough to stay open year round, which makes them the half worth knowing about in February.

Nothing here was ranked by hand. Every number falls out of the same measurement applied in every country, which is the only reason a network this small turns up at the top of anything. The drivers supply the judgement: tell us a road was worth it, and your verdict joins the number on its page.