The Most Spectacular Mountain Passes in Europe
7 places in 5 countries · updated 13 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most spectacular mountain passes in Europe are Gotthard Pass (Switzerland), Stelvio Pass (Italy) and Transfăgărășan (Romania). The list covers 7 mountain passes in 5 countries. Italy has the most, with 2. Last updated 13 October 2026.
Europe's great passes exist because its mountains stood in the way of trade for two thousand years. The Alps, the Carpathians and the Scandinavian fjord walls were crossed first by mule tracks and pilgrims, then by carriage roads engineered in the nineteenth century, and finally by asphalt that had to climb thousands of metres in the shortest possible distance. The result is a set of roads where engineering and landscape are inseparable: stacked hairpins, galleries cut into rock, and summits that open onto glaciers.
The Gotthard Pass has been a main route between northern and southern Europe since the Middle Ages, and its old Tremola road still winds down to the Ticino on cobblestones. The Stelvio Pass, at 2,757 metres one of the highest paved roads in the Alps, coils up its northeastern flank in 48 numbered hairpins. The Furka Pass runs past the source of the Rhône Glacier, while the Grossglockner High Alpine Road, opened in 1935, climbs into the heart of the Hohe Tauern beneath Austria's highest summit.
Outside the Alps the forms change. The Transfăgărășan, built across the Făgăraș Mountains in the 1970s, loops up to the glacial Bâlea Lake. Trollstigen in Norway zigzags down a sheer valley wall in eleven bends beside the Stigfossen waterfall. Lapporten in Swedish Lapland is a pass of another kind: a perfectly U-shaped valley carved by ice, long a landmark for Sámi reindeer herders. And the Strada della Forra above Lake Garda is a narrow road blasted through a gorge, with tunnels and ledges hanging over the water.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | Country | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Gotthard Pass | Mountain pass | Switzerland | |
| 2 | Stelvio Pass | Mountain pass | Italy | |
| 3 | Transfăgărășan | Mountain pass | Romania | |
| 4 | Furka Pass | Mountain pass | Switzerland | |
| 5 | Trollstigen | Mountain pass | Norway | |
| 6 | Grossglockner High Alpine Road | Mountain pass | Austria | |
| 7 | Strada della Forra | Mountain pass | Italy |
01 Gotthard Pass
Gotthardpass
Switzerland · 36 km from Altdorf46.559° N 8.562° E
Adrian Michael · CC BY-SA 3.0 Though known locally since antiquity, the route only came into general use in the early 13th century, when a first wooden bridge, built around 1220, finally carried travellers across the torrent of the Reuss in the narrow Schöllenen Gorge below Andermatt. A chapel dedicated to Saint Gotthard of Hildesheim, patron of mountain travellers, was consecrated by the Archbishop of Milan in 1230, and the pass soon took the saint's name. Guaranteeing safe passage along the road from Zürich to the Gotthard became one of the founding interests of the early Swiss Confederacy, whose expansion south towards Milan eventually brought Ticino into Swiss hands.
Did you know? Goethe climbed to the top of the pass three times but never actually crossed over to the Italian side.
02 Stelvio Pass
Passo dello Stelvio
Italy46.530° N 10.454° E
Image by gavia26210 from Pixabay The road is an engineering monument of the early nineteenth century. The Austrian Empire built it between 1820 and 1825 to connect Lombardy, then a Habsburg possession, with the Austrian heartland, and its designer, the engineer Carlo Donegani, drew a line that climbed 1,871 metres on the northern side alone. Until the First World War the pass marked the frontier between Austria-Hungary and the Kingdom of Italy, and the peaks around it were the scene of a bitter high-altitude war fought in ice and rock. The Swiss border runs along the ridge just above the summit, at the Dreisprachenspitze, the "three languages peak".
Did you know? Until 1848 the pass was kept open in winter for horse-drawn sleighs, and the journey of about 50 km between Bormio and Prad took nine hours with changes of horses.
03 Transfăgărășan
Romania45.590° N 24.628° E
Image by GhitaB27 from Pixabay It was built between 1970 and 1974 on the orders of Nicolae Ceaușescu, who wanted a route across the range that troops could use in case of a Soviet invasion like the one that had crushed Czechoslovakia in 1968. Most of the work was done by army units at high altitude, blasting the way with some six million kilograms of dynamite; the official toll was forty soldiers killed, and unofficial estimates run far higher. The road opened in September 1974, though paving went on until 1980.
Did you know? High-altitude construction was possible only four to five months a year, when the snow allowed.
04 Furka Pass
Furkapass
Switzerland · 38.6 km from Sarnen46.573° N 8.417° E
Image by hpgruesen from Pixabay The road was built in the 1860s, largely for military reasons, and its switchbacks are the reason drivers and cyclists seek it out. Near the top, set right in one of the hairpins, stands the Hotel Belvédère, built in 1882, its sharp profile on the very edge of the bend one of the most photographed sights in the Alps. The pass reached cinemas worldwide as a location in the James Bond film Goldfinger, and one curve still carries the name James-Bond-Strasse. Close by, an ice grotto is cut into the glacier: because the ice moves 30 to 40 metres a year, the hundred-metre tunnel and chamber have to be carved anew each season.
Did you know? Its name comes from the Latin furca, a two-pronged fork.
05 Trollstigen
Norway62.457° N 7.673° E
Image by plutozoom from Pixabay The setting is as much the point as the engineering. Peaks well over 1,000 metres — among them Bispen, Kongen and Dronningen, the Bishop, the King and the Queen — crowd around the pass, and the Stigfossen waterfall drops down the mountainside right beside the bends, crossed by the road on a bridge. Early in the season the road runs between walls of old snow even when the valley below is green.
Did you know? County engineer Nils Hovdenak, who planned the road, predicted in the 1920s that it would become one of Norway's most important tourist routes.
06 Grossglockner High Alpine Road
Großglockner-Hochalpenstraße
Austria47.083° N 12.842° E
Image by SL10 from Pixabay The route crosses two saddles, the Fuscher Törl at 2,428 metres and the Hochtor at 2,504 metres, the highest point of the through road. From the Fuscher Törl a short spur winds up to the Edelweissspitze at 2,571 metres, a rocky knoll with a panorama of dozens of three-thousand-metre peaks. The stonework is part of the pleasure: parapets, bridges and retaining walls built from local rock follow the curves of the road and make it look grown rather than imposed, and the views change at every bend.
Did you know? The road was a job-creation project of the Great Depression: with Austrian unemployment around 26%, construction employed about 3,200 workers.
07 Strada della Forra
Strada provinciale 38 della Forra
Italy45.764° N 10.758° E
Il sottoscritto · Public domain The road was completed in 1913 to replace the steep path that until then was the only link between the little port and the villages of the Tremosine uplands. Its audacity was admired from the start: a German newspaper of the time hailed it as the most beautiful road in the world, and Winston Churchill, visiting later, called it the eighth wonder of the world. In 2008 it reached a far wider audience as the setting of a car chase in the James Bond film Quantum of Solace.
Did you know? Work began in 1908 and took more than four years, with specialist miners, mostly from the town of Serle, blasting the passages through the rock.
How this list is ranked
Places are chosen for how they look, not for how famous they are: each one has its own description and a photograph credited to its author. The order is a single world ranking that weighs the beauty of the place in curated photography together with how widely it is documented — the number of language editions of its encyclopedia article and how often that article is read in a year. The list is rebuilt as places are added, so the order and the counts on this page are always current.
Questions people ask
- What are the most spectacular mountain passes in Europe?
- On our list, Gotthard Pass (Switzerland) ranks first, followed by Stelvio Pass (Italy) and Transfăgărășan (Romania).
- Which country has the most mountain passes in Europe?
- In our collection, the most come from Italy (2), Switzerland (2) and Austria (1).
- What is the highest paved mountain pass in the Alps?
- The Col de l'Iseran in France, at about 2,764 metres, is usually cited as the highest paved through-pass in the Alps. The Stelvio Pass in Italy is only a few metres lower at 2,757 metres.
- How many hairpin bends does the Stelvio Pass have?
- The road up from Prato allo Stelvio on the northeastern side has 48 hairpins, each marked with a numbered stone. The western side towards Bormio has fewer but is just as steep.
- Why do Alpine pass roads have so many hairpins?
- Hairpins let a road gain height on a steep slope while keeping the gradient low enough for carts and later cars. Stacking the bends on a single face also shortens the route compared with a long traverse.
- How many mountain passes are on this list in Europe?
- The list covers 7 mountain passes in 5 countries. Italy has the most, with 2.