The famous Pan-American Highway is a network of highways that connects the American continent from north to south, from Alaska, in the far north of the United States, to Tierra del Fuego, in the far south of Argentina.
It is about 25,800 kilometers long. This length makes it the longest highway in the entire world.
We cannot really say that it is a highway per se, but rather it is a system of interconnected highways between several countries.
The Pan-American Highway was created at the Fifth International Conference of American States that took place in 1923. Between the 1940s and 1950s it was financed by the United States.
The highway crosses the following countries: Canada, the United States, Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Chile and Argentina.
The route is divided into two sections, the north and the south. To the north, the route begins at the Alaska Highway. It then passes through Canada, which has no official road assigned to the Pan-American Highway. It runs through the United States via the Interstate Highway System, and from there it goes on to Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica and Panama.
This highway has an incomplete 87-kilometer stretch, known as the Darien Gap, which is located between Panama and Colombia. The highway goes as far as Turbo (Colombia) and Yaviza (Panama), but due to swamps, marshes and rivers, which made construction too expensive, it was interrupted.
The reasons are various, one of them being the existence of one of the most biodiverse natural reserves in the world, and its construction would involve crossing ecologically protected areas, but there are also economic and political reasons.
There have been attempts to resolve the gap in different ways, but a United Nations agency said in 1994 that doing so would cause great environmental damage.
If we go from Yaviza to Turbo, we reach the southern section of the highway. This route passes through Colombina, Venezuela, Peru, Ecuador, Chile, Bolivia, Paraguay and Argentina, which is considered the end of the main route. However, there are unofficial routes that continue further south, until reaching Ushuaia.
Leaving aside the Darien Gap, from Alaska to Yaviza it is 130 hours by car, while from Turbo to Buenos Aires it is 110 hours. If we want to get to Ushuaia we would have to add 37 more hours. The total journey would be 277 hours, that is, about 11 and a half days by car without stopping.
The Pan-American Highway passes through diverse climates and ecological systems, from dense jungles to frozen mountains. It is not uniform, some sections are not passable during the rainy season, and in many regions traveling by car is a risk.
