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Cable Cars
When I was in Zacatecas a few weeks ago, I used its Teleferico to cross the city and had a great overview of its urban plan within the narrow valley. As over 35 WHS have one or more cable car systems in their core zones, they warrant a closer look; so I did some additional research and updated the existing connection details with a year of construction, length in meters & minutes, etc. To determine what’s in and what’s out, I used the wiki definition of cable car: “a vehicle suspended in the air from a cable”. There apparently are 3 main types: Aerial tramways, Chairlifts, and Gondola lifts. The gondolas have a rotating bull wheel at the terminal that moves the cable forward, the aerial tramways just go back and forth.
History
The earliest incarnation of a cable car (drawn by horses) is said to be from the 17th century, but in the late 19th century the idea really took off with the use in mining areas. They carried ore from a mine located high on the mountain to an ore mill located at a lower elevation. In the early 20th century, they started transporting tourists instead of goods.
The cable car to Sugarloaf Mountain in Rio is the oldest among the WHS that I could find. It originally dates from 1912 and is said to be the third-ever constructed in the world. Other early ones are the Krossobanen in Rjukan (1928, “a gift from Norsk Hydro to the people of Rjukan, offering them a view of the sun which is obscured by the surrounding mountains during the winter months“) and the one to Table Mountain in the Cape Floral Region (1929).
Superlatives
Cable Cars at WHS that stand out:
- The world's longest cable car (according to CNN, 2017 ), 7455 meters long, passes over the Zhangjiajie National Park ( Wulingyuan ), and leads to Tianmen Mountain.
- Another candidate, stretching 7.5km, is the Skyrail running above the Barron Gorge National Park ( Wet Tropics of Queensland ); it was the world’s longest gondola cableway at the time of completion in 1995.
- The Table Mountain cable car nowadays has ‘rotairs’, rotating cabins that allow for a 360-degree view.
- A ride on Macao ’s Cable Guia takes only 80 seconds.
- The Funivia del Sacro Monte di Varallo is the steepest cable car in Europe.
- Masada ’s track starts 257 m below sea level (and ends at a modest 33 m above), thereby making it the lowest aerial tramway in the world.
No less than 17 Chinese WHS have cable cars, but I had a hard time finding data about them. Most are fairly new (>1990) and Chinese-made, but some are designed by an Austrian/Swiss company similar to a high percentage of the others across the world.
Controversy
In their evaluation of nominations, ICOMOS and IUCN seem to react not so strongly against already existing cable cars. Regarding Masada: “The only intrusions are the lower visitor and cable car facilities, which in their new form have been designed and relocated sympathetically, to minimize visual impact, though the siting of the summit station, is still controversial.” They oppose new developments however, such as at Mount Emei : “The main intrusion has been a cable car which leads to the Golden Summit of the mountain and brings some 300,000 people a year to the sensitive montane forest zone, as well as the construction of a light monorail in 1998 after inscription of the property.”
The most controversial cable car still operational is the one at the Upper Middle Rhine Valley . It was meant to be a temporary construction for the Federal Garden Show 2011 in Koblenz and to be demolished after 3 years. This didn’t happen, so after a lot of discussions, the 2013 WHC agreed to tolerate its existence until 2026, when it technically would be end-of-life.
Do you know of any other WHS with cable cars in their core zone, which aren’t in the connection yet? Or have WHS + Cable car-related stories to share?
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