The Most Spectacular Cable Cars in the World
13 places in 11 countries · updated 13 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most spectacular cable cars in the world are Wings of Tatev (Armenia), Sugarloaf Cable Car (Brazil) and Tyrolean Zugspitze Cable Car (Austria). The list covers 13 cable cars in 11 countries. Italy has the most, with 2. Last updated 13 October 2026.
A cable car turns a mountain into a view before you reach the top. The cabin leaves the ground, the valley floor sinks away, and for a few minutes you hang between rock and air with nothing but steel rope above. The most spectacular lines combine audacity of span and height with a destination that justifies them: a glacier, a granite needle, a city pinned between peaks and sea.
Rio de Janeiro's Sugarloaf Cable Car, opened in 1912, rises over Guanabara Bay. Armenia's Wings of Tatev crosses a deep gorge to a medieval monastery, and the cable car to the Aiguille du Midi lifts passengers from Chamonix to 3,842 metres opposite Mont Blanc. On the Italian side of the massif, Skyway Monte Bianco climbs in rotating cabins, and Titlis Rotair in Switzerland was the first cable car to turn its cabin through a full circle. The Schilthorn line ends at Piz Gloria, the revolving summit restaurant seen in a James Bond film, while Table Mountain in Cape Town and the Mérida cable car in the Venezuelan Andes show how far the form has travelled.
The cable cars were chosen for how they look and are ordered by beauty. Each has its own text, a photograph credited to its author and a point on the map; the section also opens country by country on separate pages.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | Country | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Wings of Tatev | Aerial tramway | Armenia | |
| 2 | Sugarloaf Cable Car | Aerial tramway | Brazil | |
| 3 | Tyrolean Zugspitze Cable Car | Aerial tramway | Austria | |
| 4 | Ngong Ping 360 | Aerial tramway | People's Republic of China | |
| 5 | Mérida cable car | Aerial tramway | Venezuela | |
| 6 | Skyway Monte Bianco | Aerial tramway | Italy | |
| 7 | Table Mountain Aerial Cableway | Aerial tramway | South Africa | |
| 8 | Malcesine–Monte Baldo Cable Car | Aerial tramway | Italy | |
| 9 | Schilthorn Cableway | Aerial tramway | Switzerland | |
| 10 | Téléphérique de l'Aiguille du Midi | Aerial tramway | France | |
| 11 | Scenic Skyway | Aerial tramway | Australia | |
| 12 | Loen Skylift | Aerial tramway | Norway | |
| 13 | Titlis Rotair | Aerial tramway | Switzerland |
01 Wings of Tatev
Armenia · 25.9 km from Kapan39.416° N 46.297° E
Armineaghayan · CC BY-SA 3.0 Wings of Tatev is an aerial tramway that crosses the gorge of the Vorotan River in southern Armenia, linking the village of Halidzor with Tatev Monastery on the far rim. The line is 5,752 metres long, built as a single section divided by towers into four spans, and when it opened on 16 October 2010 it entered the Guinness World Records as the longest non-stop double-track cable car. Two cabins, each carrying some two dozen passengers and an attendant, shuttle back and forth in opposite directions, one arriving as the other departs. At its highest the cabin hangs about 320 metres above the floor of the gorge.
Did you know? The two cabins reach speeds of about 37 km/h, crossing the full 5.7 km in a single section without any intermediate station.
02 Sugarloaf Cable Car
Bondinho do Pão de Açúcar
Brazil · 7.1 km from Rio de Janeiro22.956° S 43.167° W
Image by nuno_lopes from Pixabay The Sugarloaf Cable Car lifts visitors in two stages from the shore at Praia Vermelha to the top of Sugarloaf Mountain, the granite dome that guards the entrance to Guanabara Bay. The first cable, about 600 m long, climbs to Morro da Urca at roughly 220 m; the second, about 850 m long and much steeper towards the top, swings across the gap to the summit at about 396 m. The glass cabins hang over forest, bare rock and water, and the view unfolds as you rise: the sweep of Guanabara Bay, which drew climbers to this summit long before the cableway existed, the city's beaches and the ranks of granite peaks inland.
Did you know? In 1979 the American daredevil Steven McPeak walked along the cableway's wire to the summit, a stunt recorded as a Guinness world record.
03 Tyrolean Zugspitze Cable Car
Tiroler Zugspitzbahn
Austria · 35.8 km from Innsbruck47.421° N 10.984° E
Image by 4589191 from Pixabay The Zugspitze, the highest mountain in Germany, rises on the border with Austria, and from the Tyrolean side a cable car climbs straight up its western face. The Tiroler Zugspitzbahn starts at Obermoos above Ehrwald at 1,225 metres and rises 1,725 metres over a distance of 3.6 kilometres to the summit station at about 2,950 metres, in a single sweep of about seven minutes. It is a thrilling ride: the cabin swings high over cliffs and scree, and the rock face comes steadily closer until the cabin reaches the summit station.
Did you know? The building of the original line is the subject of Die Bergbahn, the first play by Ödön von Horváth, written in the late 1920s.
04 Ngong Ping 360
People's Republic of China · 29.5 km from Hong Kong22.256° N 113.902° E
Hiroki Ogawa · CC BY 3.0 Ngong Ping 360 is a bicable gondola lift on Lantau Island in Hong Kong, 5.7 kilometres long, that climbs from the new town of Tung Chung to the Ngong Ping plateau, home of the Po Lin Monastery and the giant Tian Tan Buddha. Before it opened in September 2006 the only way up was a winding mountain road and a bus. The cable car turned a one-hour drive into a 25-minute ride that is now an attraction in its own right.
Did you know? To follow feng shui tradition, only 1,688 tickets were sold for the first day of operation in September 2006, a number considered lucky.
05 Mérida cable car
Teleférico de Mérida
Venezuela · 13.8 km from Mérida8.529° N 71.064° W
Cesar Pérez · CC BY-SA 3.0 From the city of Mérida in the Venezuelan Andes, a chain of cable-car sections climbs more than 3,000 metres up the flanks of the Sierra Nevada to Pico Espejo, at 4,765 metres. The Mérida cable car is the highest cable car in the world and one of the longest, and the ride carries passengers from the city's valley into the high mountains of the Venezuelan Andes.
Did you know? The idea came in 1952 from a group of Venezuelan mountaineers, the Club Andino Venezolano, who wanted an easier way up into the Sierra Nevada.
06 Skyway Monte Bianco
Italy · 32.2 km from Aosta45.816° N 6.956° E
Stefano Venturini · CC BY-SA 4.0 Skyway Monte Bianco lifts passengers from the green floor of the Aosta Valley to the edge of the Mont Blanc glaciers in two long swings. The line starts at Pontal d'Entrèves above Courmayeur at about 1,300 metres, pauses at the Pavillon du Mont-Fréty at 2,173 metres, and ends at Punta Helbronner at 3,466 metres, on the frontier ridge with France. Opened in June 2015 after four years of construction, it cost around 138 million euros, making it the most expensive installation of its kind when it opened.
Did you know? The second section of the line hangs from just two pylons, one of them about 100 metres tall and standing on a 700-square-metre base.
07 Table Mountain Aerial Cableway
South Africa · 4.8 km from Cape Town33.953° S 18.403° E
Fazielah Williams · CC BY-SA 4.0 The Table Mountain Aerial Cableway carries visitors from the lower slopes of Cape Town's great flat-topped mountain to its summit plateau in about five minutes, and for nearly a century it has been the easiest way to stand on one of the most famous skylines in the world. The upper station sits at the western end of the plateau, at 1,067 metres, with views north over the city, Table Bay and Robben Island and west and south along the Atlantic seaboard.
Did you know? The floor of each car is a water tank holding about 3,000 litres, which supplies drinking water to the summit and serves as ballast in high winds.
08 Malcesine–Monte Baldo Cable Car
Funivia Malcesine-Monte Baldo
Italy · 38.7 km from Verona45.766° N 10.813° E
Wittylama · CC BY-SA 4.0 From the harbour of Malcesine, on the eastern shore of Lake Garda, a cable car climbs almost straight up the flank of Monte Baldo, the long limestone ridge that walls in the lake on the Veneto side. The ridge runs for some 40 km between the provinces of Verona and Trento and reaches 2,218 metres at Cima Valdritta, while its foot stands in the lake at about 65 metres. Few places in the Alps put such a drop between water and summit, and the Malcesine–Monte Baldo cableway is the quickest way to feel it.
Did you know? Over its 4,325 metres the cableway gains about 1,650 metres in height, and on its steepest stretch the cable rises at a gradient of 80 per cent.
09 Schilthorn Cableway
Luftseilbahn Stechelberg – Schilthorn
Switzerland46.562° N 7.858° E
Image by Julius_Silver from Pixabay The cable car from Stechelberg to the Schilthorn is a staircase of ropes climbing out of the steep-walled Lauterbrunnen valley to a summit at 2,970 metres in the Bernese Oberland. Built in stages from 1963, the line opened as far as Mürren and Birg in 1965 and reached the top in 1967, hopping from the valley floor to the cliff-top villages of Gimmelwald and Mürren, on to Birg and finally across a long, airy span to the summit, the longest and most technically demanding section of the original system. It is listed as a Swiss cultural property of national significance.
Did you know? A location scout for the Bond producers found the Schilthorn in March 1968 after spotting a postcard of its unfinished summit station in a Grindelwald hotel.
10 Téléphérique de l'Aiguille du Midi
Téléphérique de l'Aiguille-du-Midi
France45.918° N 6.870° E
Image by GLM35 from Pixabay Few machines lift you into another world as abruptly as the Téléphérique de l'Aiguille du Midi. In about twenty minutes it rises more than 2,700 metres from the streets of Chamonix to a needle of granite on the Mont Blanc massif, trading chalets and cafés for glaciers, séracs and the white dome of Mont Blanc itself, seemingly close enough to touch. When the full line opened in 1955 it was the highest passenger cable car in the world, a title it held until 1960, and its vertical rise is still one of the greatest of any cable car.
Did you know? A cable car to the summit was first proposed around 1909, almost half a century before the line was finally completed.
11 Scenic Skyway
Australia · 3 km from Katoomba33.729° S 150.301° E
Image by 22298 from Pixabay The Scenic Skyway is a short ride with an outsized view. Its cabin hangs about 270 metres above the rainforest of the Jamison Valley and crosses 720 metres of open air between two clifftops at Katoomba, in the Blue Mountains west of Sydney. When it opened in 1958 it was Australia's first cable car, and for most of the crossing there is nothing beneath the cabin but eucalypt canopy and the long sandstone walls that give these mountains their character.
Did you know? Before November 2005 the Skyway had no station on the far side; that year a second station opened on the opposite cliff face.
12 Loen Skylift
Norway61.880° N 6.837° E
Bingar1234 · CC BY-SA 4.0 The Loen Skylift climbs straight out of the Nordfjord and up the face of Mount Hoven, lifting passengers from the water's edge in the village of Loen to a summit 1,011 metres above in about five minutes. It is one of the steepest aerial tramways in the world: the cable averages a gradient of around 45 degrees and reaches 60 degrees at its steepest, so that the cabin seems less to ride up the mountain than to be hauled up a wall. From inside, the fjord drops away beneath your feet with startling speed, the village shrinking to a scatter of roofs on the shore.
Did you know? In 2019 the Norwegian BASE jumper Tom Erik Heimen leapt from Mount Hoven 66 times in 24 hours, setting a world record for vertical metres flown in a day.
13 Titlis Rotair
Switzerland · 20.2 km from Stans46.771° N 8.423° E
Björn Söderqvist · CC BY-SA 2.0 The Rotair is the final stage of the long climb from Engelberg to the top of the Titlis, and it does something no cable car had done before: as the cabin rises, its floor turns slowly through a full circle, so that every passenger, wherever they stand, gets the whole panorama. Opened in 1992 and built by the Swiss cableway maker Garaventa, it was the world's first revolving cable car. The ride from Stand at about 2,430 metres to the summit station on Klein Titlis at about 3,030 metres covers roughly 1.5 km and climbs nearly 600 metres in around five minutes, with up to 80 people in each cabin.
Did you know? In the cabins introduced in 2014, the whole gondola turns once around its vertical axis during the ride, not only the floor as in the original.
How this list is ranked
Places are chosen for how they look, not for how famous they are: each one has its own description and a photograph credited to its author. The order is a single world ranking that weighs the beauty of the place in curated photography together with how widely it is documented — the number of language editions of its encyclopedia article and how often that article is read in a year. The list is rebuilt as places are added, so the order and the counts on this page are always current.
Questions people ask
- What is the most spectacular cable car in the world?
- On our list, Wings of Tatev (Armenia) ranks first, followed by Sugarloaf Cable Car (Brazil) and Tyrolean Zugspitze Cable Car (Austria).
- Which was the first rotating cable car?
- Titlis Rotair above Engelberg in Switzerland, opened in 1992, was the first cable car whose cabin turns through a full circle during the ride.
- What is the difference between a cable car and a gondola lift?
- An aerial tramway, the classic cable car, has one or two large cabins that shuttle back and forth, while a gondola lift has many small cabins circulating continuously on a loop of cable.
- Which country has the most spectacular cable cars?
- In our collection, the most come from Italy (2), Switzerland (2) and Armenia (1).
- How many cable cars are on this list in the world?
- The list covers 13 cable cars in 11 countries. Italy has the most, with 2.