The best driving roads in Switzerland

Most countries make you travel to the driving. Italy’s fourteen highest scoring roads are strung across more than a thousand kilometres, and the average one sits a hundred kilometres from the next on the list. Switzerland’s fourteen fit inside 300 km end to end, and each is about 25 km from its nearest neighbour. You do not plan a route between them so much as park somewhere in the middle.

That closeness is not a quirk of the top of the list, it runs through the whole network. Across 5,427 hairpins in 10,929 km of scored road, Switzerland turns a hairpin every two kilometres on average, which is tighter than any other country we have measured. Italy, the next densest, runs one every 2.3.

The list splits three ways and the weight sits east. Graubünden and eastern Switzerland account for nine of the leading twenty, where Julier, Bernina, Umbrail and the San Bernardino are close enough to string together in a morning. Eight are in the Bernese and Uri Alps around the Grimsel, Furka and Susten triangle. Only three are out west in Valais and Vaud, which is where the highest scoring road of the lot happens to be.

The list is only the visible top of something much denser. With a hairpin every couple of kilometres countrywide, the useful thing here is rarely the famous pass: it is the unnamed road between two of them, and that is the one the map puts in front of you first, from wherever you have parked.

Winter closes most of the high ones, and Switzerland deals with that by going underneath rather than over: the passes shut, the tunnels and the car-trains keep running, so the same journey stays open even when the good version of it does not. Between roughly June and October you get the good version.

A score here is arithmetic on a shape: what the road does, how often, and how much it climbs while doing it. It has no idea which pass is on the postcard, which is how a road most people drive straight past finishes above one they queue for. Drivers put their own mark next to it: answer worth it, and that shows up on the road’s page.