Bolivia's most notorious highway lost its traffic almost overnight: a paved bypass through Chuspipata opened in 2006, and the old carriageway emptied of freight within a season.
What remained is the 64-kilometre gravel shelf that draws every Death Road Bolivia Motorcycle Tour and bicycle descent booked out of La Paz today. Cut into the eastern flank of the Cordillera Real by Paraguayan prisoners during the 1930s Chaco War, the route was christened Camino de la Muerte long before tourism arrived. The Inter-American Development Bank named it the world's most dangerous road in 1995.
Its significance now is geographic rather than infamous. The road falls roughly 3,500 metres in a single run, from the La Cumbre pass at 4,650 metres to Yolosa at about 1,200, crossing four climate bands on the way. Riders leave the altiplano in sleet and finish among banana palms. The corridor threads Cotapata National Park, where cloud forest condenses on the cliff face and waterfalls cross the running surface without culverts. Bolivian traffic convention inverts here — descending vehicles keep left, on the outside — a rule written for drivers who needed to see their own wheels above the drop.
Engineering explains the fear. The carriageway narrows to about 3.2 metres in places, unguarded, with vertical falls exceeding 600 metres below the outer edge. There are no barriers, no shoulder and few passing bays; the surface is loose shale, packed clay and, in the wet months, running water. Modern Death Road Bolivia Motorcycle Tour tours and guided Yungas Road descent tours therefore run with a support vehicle trailing the group, a convention adopted after the operator fatalities of the 1990s. The road remains a public right of way, and local traffic out of Coroico still uses its upper sections.
That mix of public road and managed adventure defines the place in 2026. Access is ungated and the corridor has no closing time, though a conservation fee of 50 BOB per person goes toward upkeep of the Cotapata section; the address drivers are given is simply Yungas Road, La Paz Department, Bolivia. Passable at any hour, it is nonetheless a morning road — almost every Death Road Bolivia Motorcycle Tour tour and cycling group reaches the pass between 07:00 and 10:00, while the cloud layer still sits below the summit of Huayna Potosí to the north.
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