There is a particular kind of vertigo that belongs only to cable cars. A plane puts glass and altitude between you and the ground; a cable car simply lifts you off the valley floor, hangs you in the air on a wire, and twenty minutes later opens the door somewhere the human body was never really meant to stand. The fifteen rides below all finish above 3,500 metres — several higher than any peak in the Alps — and they are ranked strictly by the elevation of the upper station, the point where the ride actually delivers you. That is the measure the record books use, not the mountain's summit: plenty of these cableways stop well below the peak they climb. Every entry is a passenger aerial cable car or gondola in service today, not a chairlift, a funicular or a mountain railway, and where sources disagree the countdown follows the operator or the record keeper.
15 Highest Cable Cars in the World (2026)
The record The highest cable car in the world is the Dagu Glacier Gondola, in China — 4,843 m (15,889 ft), top station elevation. Source: Guinness World Records - highest passenger ropeway station. Verified .
Highest Cable Cars in the World The Ranking at a Glance
Fun Facts About the World's Highest Cable Cars
- The top of the list is higher than the Alps. The Dagu Glacier Gondola sets you down at 4,843 metres — above the 4,806-metre summit of Mont Blanc, the highest mountain in the Alps, which no cable car reaches at all.
- The fifteen span almost 1,300 metres. The gap between Dagu at 4,843 metres and the River Run Gondola at 3,550 metres is greater than the full height of most of the world's tallest buildings.
- China holds four of the fifteen. Dagu, Jade Dragon Snow Mountain, Shika Snow Mountain and Hailuogou are all in the mountains of Sichuan and Yunnan, on the eastern rim of the Tibetan Plateau.
- Two of them tie exactly. The Aiguille du Midi in France and the Kalinchowk Darshan Cable Car in Nepal both finish at 3,842 metres. The French cabin takes the higher rank on vertical rise — 2,807 metres climbed against a few hundred.
- One of the highest is a commuter line. Mi Teleférico in Bolivia reaches 4,095 metres at its El Alto end, but it is public transport — the longest urban cable car network in the world, priced as a bus fare.
1. Dagu Glacier Gondola
At 4,843 metres, the Dagu Glacier Gondola is recognised by Guinness World Records as the highest passenger ropeway station on Earth — a title it has held since the line opened in 2008. The cabins climb roughly three kilometres out of the valley in Heishui County, deep in the Ngawa Tibetan and Qiang Autonomous Prefecture of Sichuan, gaining something like 1,250 metres of height in about ten minutes. That is a brutal rate of ascent for a body to absorb, and the thin air announces itself the moment you step out.
What waits at the top is a glacier field on the eastern rim of the Tibetan Plateau, a place of turquoise meltwater pools and ice that has been retreating within living memory. The station keeps a café that trades on being the highest of its kind anywhere. One quirk worth knowing before you go: the plaque at the summit terminal reads 4,860 metres, slightly above the 4,843 metres Guinness certified, so you may see the ride advertised at either figure depending on whose sign you are reading.
2. Mérida Cable Car
Rising to 4,765 metres at Pico Espejo, Venezuela's Mérida Cable Car — known as Mukumbarí — is the highest cable car outside Asia and the second highest anywhere. It is also one of the longest, running about 12.5 kilometres in five linked stages from the city of Mérida at 1,577 metres, which means a single continuous journey gains more than three vertical kilometres. Few rides on the planet change the world outside the window so completely: you board among coffee country and step out onto bare Andean rock and permanent ice.
The system first opened in 1960, was retired in 2008 when it had worn past the point of patching, and was rebuilt from the towers up before returning to service in 2016. It has seen repeated maintenance suspensions since, so it is worth checking the line is running before you plan a day around it. The staged layout is part of the appeal — each station is a place to stop, catch your breath and let your body adapt rather than a turnstile to hurry through. From the top, in clear weather, Pico Bolívar stands close enough to feel like an intrusion.
3. Jade Dragon Snow Mountain Cable Car
The Glacier Park cableway on Jade Dragon Snow Mountain tops out at 4,506 metres, lifting visitors from a base at 3,356 metres in around fifteen minutes across a span of roughly 2,900 metres. That is about 1,150 metres of vertical in one go, delivered onto a viewing platform pinned to the flank of a mountain whose true summit, Shanzidou at 5,596 metres, has never been climbed. Lijiang's old town lies far below in Yunnan, warm and green, which makes the transition feel even less plausible than the numbers suggest.
From the upper station a boardwalk runs on up the slope for those still willing to work for it, reaching about 4,680 metres on foot beside the mountain's largest glacier. Most people do not get that far, and there is no shame in it — the oxygen at the top station is thin enough that the walkways are lined with cylinders and the pace of every visitor slows to a shuffle. Jade Dragon has three separate cableways; this is the high one.
4. Shika Snow Mountain Cableway
Shika Snow Mountain's cableway carries passengers to 4,449 metres, effectively the summit of a peak whose main top is recorded at 4,449.5 metres, just outside Shangri-La in Yunnan's Diqing Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture. The ride is built in two stages and runs some 4.2 kilometres in total, starting down on the Napa grassland at around 3,270 metres and pausing at an alpine pasture near 3,800 metres before the second section commits to the summit ridge.
The reason to make the climb is the view rather than the mountain itself. On a clear morning the summit deck looks out over a horizon of named peaks — Meili, Haba and Jade Dragon among them — which is why local guides sell it as the one place you can see eight snow mountains at once. The whole ascent takes the better part of an hour, and the ridge at the top is exposed enough that weather can close the view in minutes.
5. Mi Teleférico
Mi Teleférico's highest station, 16 de Julio in El Alto, sits at 4,095 metres — and unlike almost everything else on this list, it is not a tourist attraction at all. It is a commuter network, the longest urban cable car system in the world, strung in coloured lines above the bowl of La Paz to move ordinary people to work. The central stations sit down near 3,689 metres and the network reaches as low as about 3,267 metres in the wealthy southern valleys, so the cabins are constantly bridging a vertical gap that used to cost an hour in traffic.
Riding it is the cheapest aerial sightseeing anywhere: you buy a transit fare and float over rooftops, football pitches, markets and cemeteries while the Andes stack up on the skyline. The system exists because La Paz and El Alto are built on impossible terrain, one draped down a canyon and the other spread across the altiplano rim above it, and no road network was ever going to solve the problem. It remains the best argument in the world that a cable car can be infrastructure rather than a ride.
6. Gulmarg Gondola
The second phase of the Gulmarg Gondola reaches 3,980 metres on the shoulder of Apharwat Peak in Indian-administered Jammu and Kashmir, making it the highest cable car in South Asia and, by most reckonings, among the top handful worldwide. The system runs in two stages from the meadow resort of Gulmarg at about 2,690 metres, with the first phase climbing to Kongdoori and the second — completed in 2005 — carrying on up the bare upper slopes to the ridge.
In winter this is a serious ski lift, opening terrain that has given Gulmarg a reputation far out of proportion to its size. In summer it is a straightforward tourist ride onto snowfields that survive well past the point where the valley below has turned green. The peak itself continues above the top station to around 4,200 metres, so the figures quoted for this ride vary depending on whether a source is describing the gondola or the mountain it climbs.
7. TelefériQo
Quito's TelefériQo climbs to 3,945 metres on Cruz Loma, a shoulder of the Pichincha volcano that looms over the western edge of the Ecuadorian capital. The line opened in 2005 and covers about 2,237 linear metres in roughly twenty minutes, starting from a base station already high at 3,117 metres — a reminder that Quito itself is one of the highest capital cities on Earth before you leave the ground at all.
The payoff is a view along the whole length of the city, a narrow ribbon of buildings pressed into a valley between volcanoes, with the snowcapped cones of the Avenue of the Volcanoes visible on a clear day. Because the base is already so high, the ride adds only about 800 metres, but arriving visitors who have not yet acclimatised often feel this one hardest of all — a slow walk on the ridge above the upper station is enough to prove the point.
8. Matterhorn Glacier Paradise
At 3,883 metres, Matterhorn Glacier Paradise above Zermatt is billed by its operator as the highest cable car station in Europe, and it is certainly the highest point on the continent that any visitor can reach without walking or climbing. The station is bored into the Klein Matterhorn itself, and the arrival hall where the cabins dock sits a little lower — around 3,820 metres — with a lift running up through the rock to the viewing platform that carries the headline figure.
What you get for it is one of the great panoramas of the Alps: the Matterhorn from an angle almost nobody photographs, plus a horizon of four-thousanders running into Italy. There is a glacier palace cut into the ice beneath the summit and skiing that survives into high summer. The station also anchors the crossing into the Italian side of the massif, which makes it a border post as much as a viewpoint. Russia's Elbrus cableway disputes the European record; the two claims rest on measuring slightly different things.
9. Elbrus Cable Car (Gara-Bashi)
The Gara-Bashi station on Mount Elbrus stands at 3,847 metres, and it is the highest point in the Caucasus reachable by cable car — a distinction that puts it in direct competition with Zermatt for the title of Europe's highest station, since Gara-Bashi sits higher than the hall where the Swiss cabins actually dock. The line climbs in stages from Azau at about 2,350 metres, by way of Krugozor at 3,000 metres and Mir at roughly 3,455 metres, with the final Mir–Gara-Bashi gondola dating from 2015.
Elbrus is the highest mountain in Europe at 5,642 metres, and Gara-Bashi is where the tourist infrastructure stops and the mountaineering begins. Climbers use the top station as their launching point, sleeping in the barrel-shaped huts clustered around it before starting for the summit in darkness. For everyone else it is a glacier at the top of a lift, blank and white and considerably colder than the resort village below.
10. Aiguille du Midi Cable Car
The Aiguille du Midi cable car finishes at 3,842 metres above Chamonix, and it does so with the most dramatic single span in the business: after an intermediate stop at Plan de l'Aiguille, the upper section runs to the granite spire without a single support pylon between. The cabins dock at 3,777 metres inside the peak, and a lift carries visitors the rest of the way to the summit terrace that gives the ride its headline height. From Chamonix at 1,035 metres, the whole ascent gains 2,807 metres — the greatest vertical rise of any cable car anywhere.
That vertical figure is also the tiebreaker here, because this ride and the Kalinchowk cable car in Nepal finish at exactly the same 3,842 metres; the Aiguille du Midi takes the higher rank on the strength of climbing seven times as far to get there. At the top there is a bridge between two pinnacles, a glass box projecting over a thousand-metre drop, and a view straight into the Mont Blanc massif — and, for the properly equipped, a door out onto the ridge where the Vallée Blanche descent begins.
11. Kalinchowk Darshan Cable Car
Nepal's Kalinchowk Darshan Cable Car ends at 3,842 metres beside the Kalinchowk Bhagwati temple in Dolakha district — the same elevation as the Aiguille du Midi in France, an exact dead heat between two rides that could hardly be less alike. The Nepali line opened in 2018, runs about 2.5 kilometres from the village of Kuri at roughly 3,447 metres, and takes only about six minutes; its vertical gain of a few hundred metres is why it ranks just behind the French cabin on the tiebreaker.
The destination is a Hindu shrine to the goddess Kali on an exposed ridge, and the cable car exists mainly to carry pilgrims who once faced a long uphill walk to reach it. That has also turned Kalinchowk into a popular winter destination, because the ridge collects snow within a few hours' drive of Kathmandu — for a great many Nepali visitors this ride is where they see snow for the first time.
12. Tochal Telecabin
Station 7 of Tehran's Tochal Telecabin sits at 3,740 metres on the main ridge of Mount Tochal, at the end of one of the longest gondola lines ever built — roughly 7.5 kilometres of cable running from the Velenjak valley at 1,900 metres on the northern edge of the city. The project began in 1974 and the line has been carrying passengers since 1978, which makes it a survivor as well as a record holder.
The geography is what makes it remarkable: a city of millions sits at one end and an alpine ski slope at the other, connected directly by cable, with the top station high enough that the Tochal summit is only a short walk beyond. On a clear winter day you can leave Tehran's traffic and be standing in deep snow above 3,700 metres inside an hour, looking back down at the smog layer pooled in the basin you just left.
13. Hailuogou Glacier Cable Car
The Hailuogou glacier ropeway runs to an observation deck at 3,600 metres, carried on a span of around 3.5 kilometres that crosses directly over the ice rather than following a ridge. It links Camp 3 to Camp 4 inside the Hailuogou valley in Luding County, Sichuan, on the eastern flank of the Mount Gongga massif — and the crossing is the point, because it puts the glacier's icefall beneath the cabin floor rather than off in the distance.
Hailuogou is unusual among the world's glaciers for reaching so far down into forest, so the ride passes from dense green slopes to raw ice in a matter of minutes. The valley was badly damaged by the 2022 Luding earthquake and spent roughly three years closed for reconstruction before reopening in 2025 with rebuilt access roads and tunnels. Hot springs at the valley floor make an unlikely but very welcome coda to a day spent at altitude.
14. Teide Cable Car
The Teide cable car lifts passengers to La Rambleta at 3,555 metres in about eight minutes, climbing 1,199 metres from a base station at 2,356 metres on the volcanic plateau of Tenerife. It is the highest cable car in Spain, and it is the only entry on this list that ends on an island in the middle of the Atlantic — which gives the summit a genuinely strange quality, an alpine altitude with an ocean horizon on every side.
The upper station stops 160 metres below the true summit of Pico del Teide at 3,715 metres; going the rest of the way on foot requires a permit issued in limited numbers. Even without it, the walks from La Rambleta along the crater rim are the reason most people come, running out across bare lava to viewpoints above a sea of cloud. In the early morning the peak throws a perfect triangular shadow out over the Atlantic.
15. River Run Gondola
Closing out the fifteen, the River Run Gondola at Keystone in Colorado tops out around 3,550 metres on Dercum Mountain, climbing from a base at 2,829 metres in River Run Village. PeakVisor's survey of the world's mountain lifts records it as the highest cable car in the United States, which says as much about American resort geography as it does about this particular line — the Rockies put their lift bases at altitudes that would be respectable summits in the Alps.
It runs in both seasons, feeding skiers onto Dercum Mountain in winter and hikers and mountain bikers onto the same slopes once the snow has gone. Keystone publishes the top of Dercum Mountain at 11,640 feet, which is the figure you will see on the trail map, and it converts to within a couple of metres of the elevation used here. It is a working resort gondola rather than a spectacle, and there is something clarifying about that: the same technology that hangs above a Sichuan glacier also just gets people up a hill in Summit County.
FAQ: The World's Highest Cable Cars
What is the highest cable car in the world?
The Dagu Glacier Gondola in Sichuan, China, whose upper station stands at 4,843 metres. Guinness World Records recognises it as the highest passenger ropeway station anywhere, a title it has held since the line opened in 2008. A plaque at the top terminal quotes a slightly higher 4,860 metres, so both figures circulate.
How is "highest" measured on this list?
By the elevation of the upper station — the point where the ride actually sets you down. That is deliberately not the mountain's summit, because several of these cableways stop hundreds of metres below the peak they climb. It also excludes chairlifts, funiculars and mountain railways, counting only passenger aerial cable cars and gondolas in service today.
Which is the highest cable car in Europe?
It depends on what you measure. Zermatt's Matterhorn Glacier Paradise advertises 3,883 metres, the height of its viewing platform inside the Klein Matterhorn. Russia's Gara-Bashi station on Mount Elbrus reaches 3,847 metres. But the Swiss cabins actually dock nearer 3,820 metres, below Gara-Bashi, so both operators can fairly claim a European record.
Do you need to worry about altitude sickness?
Yes, on the highest of them. A cable car lifts you far faster than your body can acclimatise — Dagu gains around 1,250 metres in roughly ten minutes — so headaches, breathlessness and dizziness are common above 4,000 metres. The staged systems, like Mérida's five stations, let you pause and adjust on the way up.
Are any of the world's highest cable cars used as public transport?
One is. Bolivia's Mi Teleférico, whose 16 de Julio station in El Alto sits at 4,095 metres, is a commuter network rather than an attraction — the longest urban cable car system in the world, carrying people to work above the canyon that divides La Paz from El Alto. Every other entry here is a mountain or tourist line.
Planning more of your trip? Keep exploring more world record-breakers.