In 1995 the Inter-American Development Bank gave a single Bolivian highway a title no engineer wants: the most dangerous road in the world. The route runs 64 kilometres from La Cumbre pass, at roughly 4,650 metres, down to the subtropical village of Yolosa below Coroico.
Paraguayan prisoners of war cut most of it into the cliff face during the Chaco War of the 1930s. A modern bypass opened in 2006, and the old carriageway emptied of freight almost overnight.
That emptying is why Death Road Bike Tour La Paz tours exist at all. What served for decades as a two-way artery for buses and lorries is now a gravel corridor used mainly by cyclists, a few local vehicles, and the residents of the hamlets strung along it. The North Yungas Road remains a working right-of-way rather than a closed track. Uphill traffic holds the inside line and downhill riders keep to the outer edge, a reversal of Bolivian convention dating from the years when drivers needed to see their own wheels against the drop.
The descent loses close to 3,500 vertical metres in a single morning, and the change registers less as altitude than as air. Riders leave a glaciated pass where oxygen runs thin and finish among banana plants, coca terraces and cloud forest heavy with humidity. The carriageway is barely three metres wide in places, unpaved beyond the first stretch of asphalt, and edged by waterfalls that spill directly across the surface. There are no guardrails. Crosses set into the rock mark where vehicles left it. The corridor sits inside a protected area, and a 50 BOB national park entrance fee is collected per person at the police checkpoint.
Camino de la Muerte, as Bolivians call it, has become one of the country's defining landmarks, and the Yungas Road cycling descent now draws riders who have never raced a bicycle. Death Road Bike Tour La Paz tickets are, for many travellers, the reason the Yungas appears on a Bolivian itinerary at all, and the capital remains the single hub from which every convoy sets out toward La Cumbre.
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