The Most Spectacular Cable Cars in Europe
7 places in 5 countries · updated 13 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most spectacular cable cars in Europe are Tyrolean Zugspitze Cable Car (Austria), Skyway Monte Bianco (Italy) and Malcesine–Monte Baldo Cable Car (Italy). The list covers 7 cable cars in 5 countries. Italy has the most, with 2. Last updated 13 October 2026.
Europe's cable cars carry passengers into high mountain terrain that once belonged only to climbers. In the Alps, where peaks rise thousands of metres above inhabited valleys, aerial cableways have opened glaciers, ridges and summits to millions of visitors since the early twentieth century, and modern designs add rotating cabins and glass floors. In Norway, the same idea lifts travellers from fjord level to mountain tops in minutes.
The Téléphérique de l'Aiguille du Midi climbs from Chamonix to a rock spire at 3,842 metres facing Mont Blanc, where the Step into the Void, a glass box, hangs over a drop of about a thousand metres. Across the massif, the Skyway Monte Bianco rises from Courmayeur in rotating cabins to Punta Helbronner. The Tyrolean Zugspitze Cable Car climbs from Ehrwald in Austria to the summit of the Zugspitze, the highest mountain in Germany.
In Switzerland, the Schilthorn Cableway rises to the revolving restaurant of Piz Gloria, made famous by the James Bond film On Her Majesty's Secret Service, and the Titlis Rotair above Engelberg, opened in 1992, was the first cable car in the world with a rotating cabin. Above Lake Garda, the Malcesine–Monte Baldo Cable Car turns its cabins as they climb from the shore to a long mountain ridge. The Loen Skylift in Norway climbs one of the steepest cableway routes in the world from the Nordfjord to the top of Mount Hoven.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | Country | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Tyrolean Zugspitze Cable Car | Aerial tramway | Austria | |
| 2 | Skyway Monte Bianco | Aerial tramway | Italy | |
| 3 | Malcesine–Monte Baldo Cable Car | Aerial tramway | Italy | |
| 4 | Schilthorn Cableway | Aerial tramway | Switzerland | |
| 5 | Téléphérique de l'Aiguille du Midi | Aerial tramway | France | |
| 6 | Loen Skylift | Aerial tramway | Norway | |
| 7 | Titlis Rotair | Aerial tramway | Switzerland |
01 Tyrolean Zugspitze Cable Car
Tiroler Zugspitzbahn
Austria · 35.8 km from Innsbruck47.421° N 10.984° E
Image by 4589191 from Pixabay This was the first cable car on the Zugspitze. It was built by the Leipzig firm Adolf Bleichert & Co. and opened in 1926, an economic project initiated by Hermann Stern, deputy mayor of Reutte. A summit extension opened in 1964, and the whole system was rebuilt in 1991 with two large cabins, each carrying up to 100 people, running on paired track ropes over just three pylons.
Did you know? The 1926 cable car did not reach the summit: it stopped at 2,805 metres below the ridge, and its 19-person cabins took at least 16 minutes to climb.
02 Skyway Monte Bianco
Italy · 32.2 km from Aosta45.816° N 6.956° E
Stefano Venturini · CC BY-SA 4.0 What sets the ride apart are its cabins. Built by Doppelmayr, each holds up to 80 people and turns slowly through a full circle as it climbs, so every passenger gets the whole panorama instead of a fixed window: first the larch woods and the valleys of Val Veny and Val Ferret opening on either side, then the glaciers and granite spires of the massif closing in. Each section takes only a few minutes; the change of world is sudden. The stations, designed by the architect Carlo Rossi, are sharp glass-and-steel volumes that read as instruments set into the slope rather than as mountain huts.
Did you know? Cabins travel at up to 9 metres per second, covering the lower section in about four minutes and the upper one in about seven.
03 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 The line opened in 1962 and was entirely rebuilt in 2002 by the South Tyrolean firm Hölzl. It works in two sections. The first, about 1.5 km long, lifts passengers from the lakeside station at about 130 metres to the intermediate stop at San Michele. The second, about 2.8 km long, climbs nearly 1,200 metres more to the ridge at Tratto Spino, around 1,760 metres, in roughly ten minutes. The whole ascent takes around twenty minutes.
Did you know? The two rotating cabins of the upper section each carry up to 80 passengers, while the lower section's non-rotating cabins hold 45.
04 Schilthorn Cableway
Luftseilbahn Stechelberg – Schilthorn
Switzerland46.562° N 7.858° E
Image by Julius_Silver from Pixabay The summit owes its fame to cinema as much as to the view. Before the top station was finished, the producers of the James Bond film On Her Majesty's Secret Service chose the Schilthorn as a key location, shot there between October 1968 and May 1969, and paid to complete the summit building for their use. It opened to the public as Piz Gloria, a revolving restaurant that turns through a full circle in about 45 minutes, so that diners watch the panorama move past their tables. That panorama is the real reason to come: some two hundred Alpine peaks, among them the Eiger, Mönch and Jungfrau.
Did you know? By 1967 the money had run out and the summit station stood only as a bare shell; the film producers paid to finish it in exchange for shooting there.
05 Téléphérique de l'Aiguille du Midi
Téléphérique de l'Aiguille-du-Midi
France45.918° N 6.870° E
Image by GLM35 from Pixabay The idea is older than the line. A first "Glaciers" ropeway opened in 1924 — the first passenger cable car in France — running from Les Pèlerins to La Para, and was extended in 1927 to 2,404 metres, still well short of the summit. The present route was driven by the Italian promoter Dino Lora Totino in the 1950s: the lower section, opened in 1954, climbs to the Plan de l'Aiguille at 2,317 metres; the upper section, opened a year later, crosses 2,867 metres of air in a single span with no pylon at all, hanging over the rock and ice before docking at 3,777 metres. The system was thoroughly modernised in 1990–1991 and is run by the Compagnie du Mont-Blanc.
Did you know? It still has the greatest vertical rise of any cable car in the world, from 1,035 metres in Chamonix to the 3,842-metre summit.
06 Loen Skylift
Norway61.880° N 6.837° E
Bingar1234 · CC BY-SA 4.0 The lift was built by Garaventa, part of the Doppelmayr Garaventa Group, with some 1.5 kilometres of track rope between the stations. Each cabin carries up to 45 people and travels at up to seven metres per second. Queen Sonja of Norway opened it in May 2017, and it was the first aerial tramway to be built in Norway since the 1960s. It is owned by a local company whose shareholders include the Hotel Alexandra in Loen, the lift's manufacturer and the municipality of Stryn.
Did you know? Since the lift opened, Hoven has turned into a BASE-jumping magnet, with an estimated 10,000 jumps made from the mountain.
07 Titlis Rotair
Switzerland · 20.2 km from Stans46.771° N 8.423° E
Björn Söderqvist · CC BY-SA 2.0 Those five minutes are among the most spectacular in the Alps. The line leaves the rock and scree of Stand and passes over the Titlis glacier, a field of ice broken by crevasses, while the cabin swings the view around from the green bowl of Engelberg and the Trübsee lake far below to the icy summit ridge ahead and the ranks of Central Swiss and Bernese peaks on the horizon. The cabins have since been replaced with versions that have even more glass, so that the walls almost disappear and the ice seems to pass directly beneath your feet.
Did you know? The operator billed the 2014 cabins as another world first, although cabins on the Monte Baldo cableway at Lake Garda had rotated since 2002.
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 are the most spectacular cable cars in Europe?
- On our list, Tyrolean Zugspitze Cable Car (Austria) ranks first, followed by Skyway Monte Bianco (Italy) and Malcesine–Monte Baldo Cable Car (Italy).
- Which country has the most cable cars in Europe?
- In our collection, the most come from Italy (2), Switzerland (2) and Austria (1).
- What was the first rotating cable car?
- The Titlis Rotair above Engelberg in Switzerland, opened in 1992, was the first aerial cableway with cabins that rotate during the ride. Rotating cabins have since been used on other lines, such as the Skyway Monte Bianco.
- Which James Bond film was filmed on the Schilthorn?
- On Her Majesty's Secret Service, released in 1969, used the summit building of the Schilthorn as Blofeld's mountain hideout. The revolving restaurant there is still called Piz Gloria.
- What is the Step into the Void?
- It is a glass box built out from the top station of the Aiguille du Midi near Chamonix. Visitors stand on a glass floor with a sheer drop of about a thousand metres below their feet.
- How many cable cars are on this list in Europe?
- The list covers 7 cable cars in 5 countries. Italy has the most, with 2.