Sugarloaf Cable Car

Interesting facts

In 1979 the American daredevil Steven McPeak walked along the cableway's wire to the summit, a stunt recorded as a Guinness world record.

More than 400 workers trained as climbers were needed to assemble the original line on the steep granite faces of the two peaks.

The first wooden cars, imported from Germany, carried just 22 passengers each; the cabins introduced in 1972 held 75, later reduced to 65 for comfort.

On the upper section the cabins reach about 10 metres per second, or 36 km/h, while the lower section runs at up to 6 metres per second.

Each crossing takes only about three minutes, and the line carries roughly 2,500 visitors on an average day.

Since 1912 the cableway has carried tens of millions of passengers; Brazilian sources put the total at well over 37 million.

The present cabins were built by the Swiss manufacturer CWA, part of the Doppelmayr/Garaventa group of ropeway companies.

In 2007 the German high-wire artist Falko Traber also crossed along the cable, repeating the kind of feat McPeak had made famous.

Google marked the cableway's 100th anniversary in 2012 with a special doodle.

Why it is worth it

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.

The engineer Augusto Ferreira Ramos conceived the line in 1908, inspired by the National Exhibition held that year in Urca to mark a century of Brazil's ports opening to world trade, and rallied members of Rio society to back it. When the first section opened on 27 October 1912 there were only two passenger cableways in the world, one in Spain and one in Switzerland; the summit section followed on 18 January 1913. Hundreds of workers had to carry parts up the rock faces by hand, and the name bondinho, "little tram", came from the resemblance of the cars to Rio's streetcars. The company Ramos founded still runs the line.

The original wooden cars served for about sixty years. In 1951 one of the cables snapped and passengers were left hanging for hours until a mechanic climbed down and helped organise a rescue; in 1972 a second parallel line and larger cabins replaced the old system. The cableway also became a film star: in "Moonraker" (1979) Roger Moore's James Bond fights Jaws on the roof of a car, the scene in which Jaws bites through a cable. Whatever the history, the moment that stays with most riders is the last stretch, when the cabin rises almost vertically up the granite face and the whole of Rio opens beneath it.

Getting there

The lower station is at Praia Vermelha (Av. Pasteur 520) in the Urca district of Rio de Janeiro, a short ride from Botafogo, about 2 km away. Santos Dumont Airport (SDU), the city-centre airport, is about 5 km away; Rio's international airport is Galeão (GIG). Buses and taxis reach Praia Vermelha from across the city. According to the operator, the cableway runs daily from 8:30 a.m. to 9 p.m., with last boarding at 7:30 p.m.

Sugarloaf Cable Car

Interesting facts

Why it is worth it

Getting there

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