The best driving roads in Alpine Passes

The alpine pass is the original European driving discipline — a road built to cross a mountain when the mountain would rather not be crossed. Forty-eight numbered hairpins on the Stelvio. The James Bond corkscrew on the Furka. The Grossglockner's slow climb past the glacier. Every great alpine pass is a piece of engineering and a piece of theatre simultaneously.

What unites them is the rhythm: climb, plateau, descend; tight hairpins on the steep sections, longer flowing radii on the upper plateaus. The good ones reward smooth inputs, late apexes and early throttle. The great ones do all of that while threading through scenery that you'll spend the rest of your life trying to describe.

The alpine passes listed here are the canonical set. We've prioritised passes that are fully paved, generally well-maintained, and reliably open from late spring through autumn. Gradients, hairpin counts, and elevations are the headline numbers — but the real measure is the road's flow. Some 1,800m passes drive better than 2,800m ones; we say so where it matters.