Travel to North Yungas Road

In the 1930s, during the brutal Chaco War between Bolivia and Paraguay, much of the road was carved through some of the world’s most unforgiving terrain by captured Paraguayan prisoners of war. Working with hand tools on sheer cliff faces, many died building what would become Bolivia’s lifeline between La Paz and the Amazon lowlands. The road they left was barely wide enough for a single vehicle, just 3.2 meters at its narrowest, with no guardrails between travelers and drops of more than 600 meters into the forest below.

For decades this was the only route from the capital to the Yungas, and the toll was staggering. Before the modern bypass opened in 2006, an estimated 200 to 300 people died here each year, as buses, trucks, and cars tumbled into the abyss with terrifying regularity. In July 1983, a single crash claimed more than 100 lives when an overcrowded bus plunged into the canyon, one of the worst road accidents in Bolivian history. By the mid-1990s the route was widely reported as the world’s most dangerous road, a label often credited to the Inter-American Development Bank, which only cemented its dark reputation.