The 19,000-Mile Road With a 60-Mile Gap

The Pan-American Highway is the longest motorable road in the world — roughly 19,000 miles from the Arctic Ocean in northern Alaska to the southern tip of Tierra del Fuego. It crosses 14 countries, climbs over 15,000 feet in the Andes, and passes through every climate band on Earth. There is exactly one place where it stops.

It stops in eastern Panama at a town called Yaviza. Sixty miles south, the road picks up again at Turbo, Colombia. Between them sits the Darién Gap: a strip of rainforest, swamp, and steep ridges that has never been bridged by pavement and probably never will be.

The gap is not a planning oversight. Building the road was discussed seriously by the United States and Colombia in the 1970s. They stopped for three reasons stacked on top of each other. The first was the foot-and-mouth disease quarantine — Colombia had it, Panama and the rest of North America didn't, and a road would have moved infected cattle north. The second was the indigenous Embera and Guna populations, whose land the road would split. The third was money, because draining a hundred miles of seasonal swamp for a two-lane road would cost as much as paving the rest of Central America combined.

So the gap stayed. Most overland travelers ship their vehicles around it on a freighter from Panama to Cartagena. A small number of motorcyclists and 4x4 enthusiasts have crossed it on foot or by raft, almost always with guides, sometimes with armed escorts. The route is now used heavily by migrants walking north from South America toward the US border — over 500,000 made the crossing in 2023.

The road is one road only on a map. On the ground it is two roads with a jungle between them.