The Driver's Roadbook, Spain and Portugal sample (DRAFT)
5 of 44 roads · 111 km · Spain and Portugal
Tolls, gate times and closures researched for the 2026 season. Every road carries the source it came from.
5 roads shown
111 km of road
Start here
Five roads to try. Start with Drive the route.
Drive the route hands the whole road to Google Maps, corner for corner, on the phone in your hand. No app, no account, no sign-in.
GPX file is the exact geometry, for komoot, Kurviger, Calimoto, OsmAnd or your car's own navigation. The PDF has the same road on one page, for when there is no signal.
Get me to the start hands Apple Maps or Waze a single destination, which is the job they do well. Only Google Maps can follow a whole road from a link.
One of these five will fine you if you drive it at the wrong hour.
Distance is the road as the text describes it on 3 of these 5 roads, where a published figure for the same stretch exists. On the other 2 it is measured from the GPX file we ship, because no published figure was found. The GPX file we ship can measure differently — it may add the run-up to a locked gate, or draw one line through a road we describe as a network. Where the two differ by more than 10%, we print the file's own length too, marked track.
How the drive score works
The drive score is not a feeling. It is three separate judgements, combined by one formula, applied the same way to all 44 roads.
I rate each road's corners from 0 to 5 and its scenery from 0 to 5, then subtract a traffic penalty from 0, near empty, to 2, crowded. The published score is corners, plus four fifths of scenery, minus three fifths of the traffic penalty, rescaled to a mark out of ten. Corners count for more than scenery, on purpose: this is a driving book, not a viewpoint list.
Those three ratings are judgement, not measurement. They come from maps, elevation profiles, curve counts and other drivers' published accounts rather than from a road test, which is exactly what the score is for: comparing the roads in this book against each other on one consistent scale. It cannot know the surface, the weather, or the traffic on the day you actually go.
Use it to compare roads against each other, not as a promise.
ES · 10
Open now
Sa Calobra
8.7
Carretera de Sa Calobra
Score
Mallorca · Ma-2141 · There and back
1 kmNColl dels ReisPort de Sa Calobra
Coll dels ReisPort de Sa CalobraOpenStreetMap
Distance
12.2 km
High point
682 m
Access
10 t limit
coaches must book
Scenery
5/5
Corners
5/5
Season
Open all year
The drive
26 hairpins and a 270 degree spiral bridge where the road passes under itself. Antonio Parietti built it in 1933 with no tunnels and almost no cutting, following the contour instead.
Before you go
A 10 tonne limit since a retaining wall collapsed in 2023. Coaches and anything over nine seats must book: 35 slots a day, entry between 11:00 and 13:30 only, 200 euros without a reservation.
93 bends along the Douro under terraced vineyards that are a UNESCO site. Avis called it the best driving road in the world in 2015 and the surface has been good ever since.
Before you go
Free and open all year. Harvest, from late September, puts tractors and grape lorries on it, which is the wrong week to be in a hurry and the right week to be there.
Road wedged for its whole length between limestone walls over 600 m high, with about 175 turns and almost no straight. Sunlight rarely reaches the floor, which is the point and also why it is cold.
Before you go
The longest gorge in Spain and it has been a roadworks site since 2022. The ministry says the object is safer driving rather than higher speed, so expect single-lane control rather than a closure.
Paved and in poor condition, often under five metres wide, with many drops and no barrier. 9.1 per cent at its steepest, which is not the difficulty; the width is.
Before you go
Usually open all year with occasional winter closures. It is the only vehicle crossing of the Sierra Nevada park, so when it shuts the detour is the whole massif.
The gate on this one is a date, and the fine arrives at home.
The road to Cap de Formentor is closed to private cars from 15 May to 18 October 2026, every day from 10:00 to 22:00, with fines of 100 to 200 euros. Most lists of the best drives in Mallorca do not mention it.
Iberia is not the Alps: hardly any of these roads has a toll, and what stops you is a national park permit, a landslide that has been shut for months, or a barrier below the summit. The full book has 44 roads across Spain, Portugal and Andorra, each drawn against OpenStreetMap and each carrying its own source line, so you can see which rules came from the authority that issues them and which are my own reading.