The Original System and Its Rebuild

When the Mérida cable car opened in 1960, it was built by Austrian engineers and carried passengers from the city of Mérida, at roughly 1,577 metres above sea level, to the station at Pico Espejo, at 4,765 metres — a vertical gain of 3,188 metres over four consecutive stages. The intermediate stations at La Montaña, La Aguada and Loma Redonda punctuate the climb, each one a staging point between a lower and a distinctly different climatic zone. At Pico Espejo the air holds roughly half the oxygen of sea level, and Pico Bolívar — Venezuela's highest summit at 4,978 metres — stands visibly close to the northeast.

The original gondolas ran for nearly five decades before the system was taken out of service in 2008. By that point the infrastructure was ageing, the cables and machinery demanded replacement beyond economic repair, and safety certification could no longer be sustained. The closure lasted eight years.

Grass-covered cliff edge with layered rock strata under a heavy, cloudy sky
A plateau shared by three countries, where the sandstone is two billion years old and the plants have nowhere else to go. Roraima's Cliff and What Grows on TopPhoto: Dean Davies / Pexels

The rebuilt system, manufactured by the French firm Poma, reopened in 2016 and replaced the Austrian gondolas with modern enclosed cabins rated for Andean altitude and wind exposure. Poma, a division of the Leitner group, is among the world's principal manufacturers of aerial ropeways, with installations across alpine and high-altitude environments on several continents. The four-station structure of the original was preserved in the rebuild: the routing, the intermediate stops and the 12.5-kilometre total run remain as they were.

Each section rises steeply enough that the lower stations sit in temperate cloud-forest conditions while Loma Redonda, above 4,000 metres, is in the páramo — the high-altitude Andean ecosystem of grassland and frailejón plants where frost is common year-round and vegetation grows low against cold winds. Above Loma Redonda, Pico Espejo is bare rock and permanent snow in its highest reaches, a landscape as remote from the Mérida valley floor as the climate statistics suggest.

The vertical range of the system — from subtropical city to near-glacial summit in a single continuous ride — remains exceptional by any global measure.