Table Mountain Aerial Cableway — aerial tramway
Fazielah Williams · CC BY-SA 4.0

Table Mountain Aerial Cableway

  • 1 min read
  • 33.953° S 18.403° E

Interesting facts

  • 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.
  • Each of the cableway's cables is about 1,200 metres long and weighs around 18 tonnes.
  • The cars climb about 700 metres from the lower station to the summit at speeds of up to 10 metres per second.
  • The original wood-and-steel cars carried 25 passengers; they were upgraded in 1958, 1974 and 1997.
  • Building the original cableway cost £60,000, well under the £100,000 that had been estimated.
  • The cableway carried its 28 millionth visitor on 17 January 2019, International Cable Car Day.
  • Each car can carry a load of up to 5,200 kilograms.

Why it is worth it

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.

Capetonians had dreamed of a railway to the top since the 1870s, but war twice stopped the plans. In 1926 a Norwegian engineer, Trygve Strømsøe, proposed a cableway to a group of businessmen led by Sir Alfred Hennessy, with Sir David Graaff and Sir Ernest Oppenheimer, and the Table Mountain Aerial Cableway Company was formed. The German firm Adolf Bleichert & Co. of Leipzig, then a world leader in wire ropeways, built the line, and the mayor of Cape Town opened it on 4 October 1929.

The present system dates from 1997, when the Swiss firm Garaventa installed "Rotair" cars modelled on those at Titlis in Engelberg. Each carries 65 passengers, runs on a double cable for stability in the mountain's notorious winds, and has a floor that rotates through a full circle during the ride, so that every passenger gets the whole panorama. At the top there are free guided walks along the plateau.

Getting there

The lower cable station is on the slopes above the city, about 4 km from central Cape Town. Cape Town International Airport (CPT) is about 19 km away.

Plan your visit

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Nearby places

On these lists

The Most Beautiful Places in Western Cape 7The Most Beautiful Places in South Africa 15The Most Spectacular Cable Cars 13The Greatest Modern Engineering Wonders 26The Greatest Engineering Wonders 271

From the encyclopaedia

The Table Mountain Aerial Cableway is a cable car transportation system offering visitors a five-minute ride to the top of Table Mountain in Cape Town, South Africa. It is one of Cape Town's most popular tourist attractions with approximately one million people a year using the Cableway.

Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0

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