10 European Road Trips Better Than the Amalfi Coast (With Half the Traffic)

The Amalfi Coast drive is one of the world's great road trips on paper. In practice, the famous SS163 in season is a convoy: coaches negotiating hairpins centimetre by centimetre, scooters threading the gaps, parking that costs like a hotel and exists like a myth. The views are real. So is the traffic jam you will admire them from.

Here is the liberating secret: Europe is full of roads that deliver the same ingredients (sea cliffs, hairpins, villages balanced on impossible slopes, lunch stops you will describe for years) without the queue. Some are one peninsula south of Amalfi; some are above the Arctic Circle. What they share is the ratio that matters: scenery per car. Updated for 2026/27.

Which road for which trip: a quick comparison

1. The Cilento Coast, Campania (Italy)

Start with the poetic justice: one bay south of Amalfi, the same region of Italy hides a second coastline, longer, wilder and largely ignored by the international circus. The Cilento is a UNESCO-listed national park where the coast road swings between clifftop villages like Pisciotta and Castellabate, past the Greek temples of Paestum (three of the best-preserved anywhere, standing in a meadow), through fig and olive country that considers itself, with some scientific backing, the birthplace of the Mediterranean diet.

The driving is everything Amalfi promises: sea-and-cliff hairpins, harbour lunches (Marina di Camerota, Scario), buffalo mozzarella eaten hours from the buffalo. The traffic is everything Amalfi is not: outside August you will share the road mostly with locals. Base yourself in Santa Maria di Castellabate or Palinuro and allow three days.

2. The Beara Peninsula (Ireland)

The Ring of Kerry gets the coaches; Beara, the next peninsula south, gets the peace. Its narrow, wall-lined lanes physically discourage coach tourism, a feature disguised as a bug. The loop from Kenmare or Glengarriff runs through the Caha mountains via the Healy Pass, a hairpin ladder over bare rock that ranks among Ireland's finest short drives, past copper-mining villages like Allihies painted in defiant colours against the Atlantic grey-green.

At the peninsula's tip, Ireland's only cable car sways to Dursey Island (sharing space with sheep is traditional); on the way back, Bantry Bay serves seafood chowder that recalibrates your standards. The whole loop is a relaxed two days, with four seasons per afternoon and rainbows as compensation.

3. Senja (Norway)

Lofoten's fame has reached car-park-overflow levels. Senja, Norway's second-largest island just to the north-east, delivers the same impossible geometry, with granite teeth rising vertically from teal Arctic sea, and a fraction of the visitors. The national scenic route along the island's outer coast strings together viewpoints that seem designed by a cinematographer: the jagged Devil's Teeth ridgeline across the fjord from the Tungeneset walkway, and the switchbacks down to the fishing village of Husoy and its white beaches that would pass for the Caribbean if the water were not 8 degrees.

Summer gives midnight sun and hiking (Segla is the postcard); September gives aurora over the fjords with the roads nearly empty. Allow two to three unhurried days. Ferries and the mainland bridge make it an easy pairing with Tromso.

4. The Grossglockner High Alpine Road (Austria)

The one famous entry on this list earns its place because fame works differently here. The Grossglockner is a toll road built for the drive itself, so traffic spreads across 48 kilometres of engineered switchbacks instead of jamming one coastal ledge. Thirty-six hairpins climb through climate zones (meadows, then stone, then the glacier terrace at Kaiser-Franz-Josefs-Hoehe staring straight at Austria's highest peak), with marmots whistling from the verges.

The road opens roughly May to early November (snow decides the exact dates), and arriving before nine or after four transforms the experience: golden light, empty ramps, ibex on the tarmac. The toll is worth it, and the Edelweissspitze detour is mandatory for the 360 degree payoff.

5. The N-260 Pyrenean Axis (Spain)

Spain's answer to the great alpine routes is a road most drivers have never heard of: the N-260, the "Eje Pirenaico", tracing the southern flank of the Pyrenees for hundreds of kilometres from the Mediterranean toward the Atlantic side. It is less a road than an anthology: the vertical walls of the congost gorges in Catalonia, the stone villages and Romanesque churches of the Vall de Boi (UNESCO-listed), the medieval square of Ainsa, the Ordesa canyon country around Torla, all connected by passes where the traffic is agricultural and the vultures outnumber the cars.

This is slow-Spain driving. Fill up when you can, lunch is the menu del dia in villages that close for siesta, and every side valley, Ordesa and Monte Perdido National Park above all, justifies a day on foot. Allow five days minimum for the full traverse; many people do a week and call it the best driving holiday Spain never advertised.

6. The N222 through the Douro Valley (Portugal)

The stretch of the N222 between Peso da Regua and Pinhao once won an international poll as the world's best driving road, and remarkably, the crowds still never came. The road shadows the Douro river through the world's oldest demarcated wine region, a UNESCO landscape of terraced vineyards stacked to the ridgelines, where every curve opens a new amphitheatre of vines and every village is anchored by a port-wine quinta with tastings and a terrace.

The driving is flowing rather than fierce, with sweepers along the water and short climbs to miradouros like Casal de Loivos that stop conversation. That makes it the best entry on the list for mixed-enthusiasm couples: one person gets the road, the other gets the wine. September harvest is the magic window, with grape trucks and golden light on the terraces.

7. The Gorges du Tarn, Occitanie (France)

The Verdon gets the fame; the Tarn, in France's quiet Massif Central, gets the connoisseurs. The D907bis threads the canyon floor for some fifty kilometres between limestone walls, through village gateways (Sainte-Enimie, La Malene), under cliffs where reintroduced griffon vultures wheel in squadrons. Above, the causses, vast karst plateaus, add a second, lunar road network.

This is France's best-value grand scenery: aires for wild picnics, chateau-hotels at country prices, aligot (cheese and potato in its most extreme form) as the regional fuel, and canoe stages on the green Tarn as the rest-day activity. The Millau Viaduct, the world's tallest bridge, bookends the trip. Avoid the first fortnight of August.

8. The Mani Peninsula, Peloponnese (Greece)

The Mani is a road-tripper's dream nobody queues for. It is a land of stone tower-houses built by feuding clans, running down the Taygetos mountains to Cape Tainaron, the southern tip of mainland Greece, where a lighthouse walk ends at what the ancients called the entrance to Hades. The coast road from Kardamyli (Patrick Leigh Fermor's beloved base) south through Areopoli and Gerolimenas serves cliff-and-cove driving, with sea the colour of a screensaver and traffic measured in goats.

The stops that make the trip: the Caves of Diros, where you tour an underworld river by rowing boat; tower-hotel nights in Vathia; and swimming coves reached by dirt spurs that reward small cars and mild courage. October keeps the sea warm and the roads emptier still. Allow two lazy days at minimum.

9. Durmitor and the Tara Canyon (Montenegro)

Montenegro packs alpine drama into weekend-trip dimensions, and the Durmitor ring road is the concentrate: a loop around a national park of glacial lakes and 2,500-metre peaks, crossing the Sedlo pass on a ribbon of tarmac that feels borrowed from a car advert. The co-star is the Tara river canyon, among the deepest in Europe, crossed by the arc of the Djurdjevica bridge.

Add the approach roads for a proper circuit: the Kotor serpentine's 20-odd hairpins climbing from the UNESCO bay (drive it at dawn and own it), Ostrog monastery pressed into a cliff face, and the mountain town of Zabljak as a base for Black Lake walks. Roads are good but narrow, and outside July and August you will wonder where everyone is. The answer: Amalfi.

10. The Transalpina, Southern Carpathians (Romania)

Top Gear made the neighbouring Transfagarasan famous, and summer weekends there now prove it. The Transalpina, Romania's other and higher great road, kept the silence. The DN67C climbs above two thousand metres across the Parang mountains on a route with royal history and shepherd present: treeless ridgelines rolling to every horizon, roadside stalls selling smoked cheese, and long stretches where the road ahead is visible for ten curling kilometres with nothing on it.

Practicalities: the high section opens roughly late spring to autumn, weather changes fast at altitude, and fuel planning matters. Pair it with the Transfagarasan on a weekday for the full Carpathian double, add the Saxon old town of Sibiu as a bookend, and you have Europe's best mountain-driving value.

The road-trip packing truth: your boot is the harshest environment your gear will meet

Every route above means days of vibration on mountain tarmac, gravel detours, temperature swings from Arctic ferry decks to Greek car parks, and a boot where luggage, camera bags and the drone shuffle into new arrangements at every hairpin. We covered what heat does to electronics and optics in a parked car in 12 everyday items that won't survive summer in your car, and the fix is the same in every climate: rigid, sealed cases that turn the boot into a cargo hold instead of a tumble dryer.

The setup that works: one hard case for the fragile kingdom (camera, drone, lenses, chargers) riding low and shaded, a second for documents and valuables that walks into every overnight stop, and soft bags for clothes to fill the gaps. Still weighing shells against duffels? Our hard vs. soft luggage comparison settles it per use case.

Cases for cameras, drones and electronics on the road

The Peli Air models below use HPX² polymer, up to 40% lighter than conventional hard cases, with an O-ring seal and an automatic pressure equalization valve.

• Peli Air 1506 Hermetic Case (20 l): 20 litres of interior volume, IP67 and MIL-STD-810, Pick N Pluck foam or no-foam version. Suits one camera body with lenses or a compact drone kit.
• Peli Air 1507 Waterproof Case IP67: medium hard case without wheels, Press and Pull latches, padlock protectors, foam or no-foam.
• Peli Air 1485 Case with Foam: carry-on-sized, IP67 and MIL-SPEC, fold-down handle, available with Pick N Pluck foam for a custom fit.
• Peli 1525 Air Light Waterproof Case: medium, carry-on-friendly case for a camera body with lenses or a drone controller, IP67 and MIL-SPEC.
• Peli 1400 Protector Case: compact watertight Protector case made in Germany, six colour options, Pick N Pluck foam, good for documents and valuables you carry into every hotel.

Luggage that stacks, locks and lasts

• Peli Air 1595 Lightweight Large Case: wheeled case sized between the carry-on 1535 and the large 1615, for gear-heavy trips; IP67, MIL-SPEC C-4150J.
• Peli Air 1556 Medium Wheeled Case (35 l): 35 litres, trolley handle, designed to maximum airline carry-on dimensions, so it also works for the flight out.
• Peli 1510 Protector Carry-On Case: exterior 56.1 x 35.9 x 22.9 cm, interior 50.2 x 27.9 x 19.3 cm, watertight O-ring seal, foam, no-foam or padded dividers. If you are choosing between it and the lighter Air line, read Peli 1510 vs Peli Air 1535.

Frequently asked questions

When is the best time to drive these roads in 2026/27?

Late spring and September are the sweet spot for most of the list. Mountain roads such as the Grossglockner and the Transalpina open only part of the year, so check opening dates before you commit. The Mani and the Cilento stay pleasant into October; Senja trades midnight sun in summer for aurora in September.

How do I keep camera gear safe in a parked car?

Keep it out of direct sun and out of sight, in a sealed hard case with a padlock. Heat, vibration and damp are the three enemies, and a gasketed case with foam deals with all three.

Can I fly to the start of the road trip with these cases?

Several are designed around carry-on dimensions, including the Peli Air 1556 and the Peli 1510. Always check your airline's current cabin limits before you travel.

Keep planning

If you like the idea of Amalfi-level scenery without the crowds, you may also enjoy our comparison Cinque Terre or Amalfi Coast: which to visit and why, and our list of 12 European islands you can still visit without the crowds.

Ten roads, zero coach convoys, and the radical luxury of pulling over whenever the view demands it, because behind you, for once, there is nobody. Drive gently, wave at the shepherds, and leave Amalfi to the brochures.