The best European road trips from the UK

The best European road trip from the UK is the one you can reach with the days you have. From Calais, the Swiss high passes are about 900 km away, the Route des Grandes Alpes about 850 km, and the Stelvio about 1,100 km. Each is a genuinely different drive, and each has a season of roughly five months.

Almost every list of European road trips is written for someone who will hire a car when they land. This one is not. It assumes you are taking your own car, from your own driveway, across the Channel - which changes the arithmetic entirely. It makes the first and last day of the holiday a driving day. It makes the car itself part of the trip. And it means a handful of rules apply to you that do not apply to a hire car with French plates.

Why drive rather than fly and hire

Driving your own car to the Alps makes sense when the car is the point of the holiday, when you are travelling as a group, or when you want to carry more than an airline will let you.

The honest case against is time: you will spend two of your days on motorways, and a Channel crossing at each end. The case for is everything else. You arrive in a car you know, set up how you like it, on tyres you trust. You can pack a picnic, a case of wine on the way home, and a spare set of brake pads. For a group, four people in one car crossing on Le Shuttle is cheaper than four flights and a hire car - and nobody has to explain to a rental desk why the brakes smell.

There is also the thing nobody quite admits: the drive south is the holiday. The Alps do not begin at the first hairpin. They begin somewhere on the A26 when the land starts to rise.

The five drives

1. The Swiss high passes - Furka, Grimsel, Nufenen and Susten

The densest concentration of great driving roads in Europe. Four passes above 2,100 m, all within an hour of one another, all reachable from a single base around Andermatt. The Furka (2,429 m) is the famous one - the Aston Martin DB5 was chased along it in Goldfinger - but the Grimsel, dropping through bare granite past turquoise reservoirs, is the one people talk about afterwards.

You can drive all four in a single long day. You should not. Drive two, stop for lunch above the treeline, and drive the other two tomorrow.

2. The Route des Grandes Alpes

The classic linear drive: roughly 700 km from Lake Geneva to the Mediterranean, crossing sixteen major cols. It runs from Thonon-les-Bains on the lake to Menton on the coast, and it is the only drive here that ends somewhere completely unlike where it started - you leave in alpine meadow and arrive among palm trees.

Its high point is the Col de l'Iseran at 2,764 m, the highest paved pass in the Alps. Its most misunderstood is the Col de la Bonette: the loop road around the Cime de la Bonette climbs to 2,802 m and is frequently billed as the highest paved road in Europe, but the col itself is 2,715 m, and the loop is a spur rather than a pass. It is a marvellous piece of road either way.

3. The Stelvio and the Dolomites

Forty-eight numbered hairpins on the northern side, and a summit at 2,757 m. The Stelvio is the second-highest paved pass in the Alps after the Iseran, and by some distance the most photographed. Go early - by ten in the morning in August the switchbacks are a slow-moving queue of coaches, cyclists and motorcycles.

The reward for making the effort is that the Stelvio sits at the doorstep of the Dolomites, where the Sella, Pordoi and Gardena passes form a loop you can drive twice in a day and enjoy more the second time. Different rock, different light, entirely different drive.

4. The Grossglockner High Alpine Road

A 48 km toll road built between 1930 and 1935 for no reason except the view. It is not a route between two places anyone needs to get to; it is a piece of civil engineering built as a destination, topping out at the Hochtor at 2,504 m. Because it is privately operated it is immaculately surfaced, and because it is gated it is never open in winter.

Reckon on €46.50 for a car and €36.50 for a motorcycle as a day ticket (GROHAG, the road's operator). It is not covered by the Austrian motorway vignette - that is a separate charge, and a great many visitors discover this at the gate.

5. The Black Forest and the Vosges, on the way

The road trip you can take without committing to the Alps at all. Both ranges sit within a day of Calais, either side of the Rhine. The Route des Crêtes in the Vosges and the Schwarzwaldhochstrasse in the Black Forest are lower, greener and open far more of the year than any alpine pass.

If you have a long weekend rather than a fortnight, this is the answer. It is also the best possible way to break the drive south: a night in Alsace turns a punishing motorway slog into two civilised half-days.

Compared side by side

How long you really need

Allow ten days for the Alps. Two of them are the drive out and the drive home, which leaves a week in the mountains - enough to drive four or five great passes without treating any of them as a box to tick.

The commonest mistake is to plan a week and lose four days of it to transit. From Calais, the French Alps are around eight hours of driving; the Swiss passes closer to nine. That is a legal day at the wheel and an utterly miserable one. Break it. A night somewhere in Champagne, Burgundy or Alsace costs you nothing in holiday and buys you an entire extra day of energy at the other end.

If you have four days, do the Black Forest. If you have seven, pick one range and stay in it. If you have twelve, you can link two.

When to go

Late June to mid-September is the reliable window for the high passes. Before then, some will still be under snow; after early October, the first closures begin.

The high alpine passes are shut for roughly half the year. In 2026 the Furka, Grimsel and Nufenen passes were open from 28 May to 27 October, and the Susten from 6 June (alpen-paesse.ch, which publishes live status for every Swiss pass). The Grossglockner, being a gated toll road that is actively cleared, runs longer - it reopened on 25 April 2026 and typically runs to the start of November.

Within that window: July and August bring the best weather and the worst traffic. Early September is quieter, the light is better, and the hotels are cheaper. It is what we would choose, and usually do.

Common questions