Titlis Rotair

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.

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.

The Titlis itself, at 3,238 metres, is the highest peak of the Uri Alps north of the Susten Pass, on the border of the cantons of Obwalden and Bern. The first cableway to Klein Titlis was inaugurated in 1967, and the Rotair replaced its last section a quarter of a century later. At the top the mountain station opens onto a series of high-altitude experiences: an illuminated cave cut into the glacier, where the ice is thousands of years old; the Titlis Cliff Walk, a suspension bridge about 100 metres long strung above a sheer drop, billed as the highest in Europe; and the new Titlis Tower summit building designed by Herzog & de Meuron.

The journey up is part of the pleasure. From Engelberg in the valley, a modern gondola climbs to Trübsee and Stand before the Rotair takes over, so the whole ascent from about 1,000 metres to over 3,000 metres takes roughly half an hour, moving from meadows and forest to permanent snow.

Getting there

The valley station is a short walk of about ten minutes from Engelberg railway station, and there is paid parking. Engelberg is reached by the Luzern–Engelberg Express of the Zentralbahn from Lucerne in about 45 minutes, with hourly trains; Kriens, on the edge of Lucerne, is about 31 km from the summit as the crow flies. The nearest international airport is Zurich (ZRH), about 77 km away.