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Where is the largest cable car system?

Mi Teleférico (which translates to “my cable car”) is an aerial cable car system that serves the world's highest metropolitan area, La Paz–El Alto in Bolivia.



The largest and most extensive cable car system in the world is Mi Teleférico in La Paz and El Alto, Bolivia. Unlike tourist-focused gondolas in the Alps or at theme parks, Mi Teleférico serves as the primary urban transit backbone for the metropolitan area, functioning like a "subway in the sky." In 2026, the system consists of 11 interconnected lines (identified by colors like Red, Silver, and Sky Blue) spanning over 30 kilometers (18.6 miles) of track. The system was built to solve the geographical nightmare of La Paz, which is situated in a deep canyon with a massive elevation change of nearly 400 meters between the city center and the high plateau of El Alto. It carries hundreds of thousands of passengers daily, offering a clean, silent, and incredibly scenic alternative to the congested, winding roads below. While other cities like Medellín, Colombia, or even the Roosevelt Island Tram in NYC utilize cable cars, nothing currently matches the scale, passenger volume, or sheer structural complexity of the Bolivian network, which has become a global model for sustainable mountain-city transportation.

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The Swiss-Italian Matterhorn Alpine Crossing opened Saturday, July 1st, becoming the highest cable car in the world. The new portion connects Matterhorn Glacier Paradise in Zermatt, Switzerland, to the station Testa Grigia in Cervinia, Italy, and hovers 1 mile over the Theodul Glacier.

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Ba Na Hills Cable Car (Da Nang, Vietnam) The world's longest cable car is more than five kilometers long.

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The Predigtstuhlbahn in Bad Reichenhall is the world's oldest originally preserved cable car. Since 1928 it has been considered a model for the ideal cable car and the epitome of elegance in ropeway construction. Justifiably, the Predigtstuhlbahn is a protected monument.

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Skyway Monte Bianco is a cable car in the Italian Alps, linking the town of Courmayeur with Pointe Helbronner on the southern side of the Mont Blanc massif. Taking over three years to construct, it opened in 2015 at a cost of 110 million euros, and is considered to be the world's most expensive cable car installation.

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In American English, cable car may additionally refer to a cable-pulled street tramway with detachable vehicles (e.g., San Francisco's cable cars). As such, careful phrasing is necessary to prevent confusion. It is also sometimes called a ropeway or even incorrectly referred to as a gondola lift.

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A cable car is superficially similar to a funicular, but differs from such a system in that its cars are not permanently attached to the cable and can stop independently, whereas a funicular has cars that are permanently attached to the propulsion cable, which is itself stopped and started.

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The San Francisco cable car system is the world's last manually operated cable car system and an icon of the city of San Francisco.

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In 2017, 10 people were killed when a cable car fell into a ravine hundreds of meters (feet) deep in the popular mountain resort of Murree after its cable broke.

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After an average of 30 years, cable cars reach the end of their life, although some components such as cables have to be discarded considerably earlier. In some cases, legal requirements demand the removal of installations after just twenty years, so it is a good thing that cable cars have multiple lives.

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The Cavalese cable car crash is the deadliest cable car crash in history. On 9 March 1976, the steel supporting cable broke as a fully loaded cable car was descending from Mt. Cermis, near the Italian ski resort of Cavalese in the Dolomites, 40 km (25 mi) north-east of Trento.

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