The best driving roads in Spain

The Spanish driving itinerary more or less writes itself. Pyrenees first, then west along the Cordillera Cantábrica, and a loop into the Picos if the week allows. Run the scores against that route and it collects eleven of the country’s top twenty, which is a good week by any measure. It also drives away from the other eight.

Those eight are in Almería and Granada, down in the southeast, in the driest province in Europe and the one province with a genuine desert in it. Nobody plans a driving holiday there. AL-3102 crosses the Sierra de los Filabres at 88, higher than anything in the Pyrenees, higher than anything in the north, and higher than any other road we have scored in Spain.

Worth knowing what that number rewards. The old pass over the Coll de Sóller on Mallorca turns 51 times in 10.7 km, one hairpin every two hundred metres, more than any road in the country, and it scores 70. The scoring reads corners, hairpins, elevation and flow together, and caps how far any single one of them can carry a road on its own. Sóller spends all 325 metres of its height on one idea, brilliantly. The three above it are doing four things at once for nearly thirty kilometres each.

All of which sounds like a trip, and it does not have to be one. Every province has roads worth a detour, and the map’s first job is finding the best one near you rather than the best one in the country. For most people the first one is a forty minute drive, not a weekend.

One practical thing, because this list has a season and it is not the same season all the way down. The northern half climbs high enough to hold snow into spring. The southern half sits in the warmest, driest corner of mainland Europe. In February, the bottom half of this page is the half to drive.

Every score on this page is measured rather than voted on, read straight off the road’s own geometry. Then the drivers weigh in. Once enough people have marked a road as worth it, that sits beside the number on the road’s page.