La Paz by Cable Car

You land in the morning and by the afternoon you are already looking at La Paz from a cabin: the La Paz cable car city tour is the only one in the catalogue that asks for no prior acclimatisation, and you can do it the day you arrive. It is done entirely on foot and on public transport — no vehicle, no waiting around, and nothing demanded of the body.

The first part is at ground level. Plaza Mayor de San Francisco with its dark stone church, Plaza Murillo with the cathedral and the presidential palace, the Teatro Municipal Alberto Saavedra Pérez, and calle Jaén: a hundred cobbled metres, whitewashed walls, wooden balconies and five museums, one of the best-preserved colonial streets in the city. Pedro Domingo Murillo lived in one of those buildings; he led the La Paz revolution of 16 July 1809. You walk slowly. At 3,600 metres nobody walks fast on their first day, and here there is no need to.

Then you go up. Mi Teleférico is the largest urban cable car network in the world — ten lines, some 32 interconnected kilometres, the first of them opened in May 2014 — but the figure that matters is a different one: it is not an attraction. It is the transport of the roughly 300,000 people a day who use it to get to work, to school or to the market. You will ride in the same cabin as they do, on the same ticket, at the same time of day. That is the difference between looking at a city and using it. The Orange Line runs up to the old Estación Central, and from there the Red Line does something very few cities in the world can offer: it climbs the five hundred metres of height that separate the bottom of the basin from the rim above, and it climbs them in minutes. The cabin travels in silence. Below you pass corrugated roofs, courtyards, football pitches, streets meeting at impossible angles, and behind, further away every second, the whole basin of La Paz with Illimani closing it off.

When you step out in El Alto, do the maths: you are some five hundred metres above where you started the morning, in a city where that normally costs hours of walking and breathing — and your legs did absolutely nothing. And it is worth putting this properly: El Alto is not a viewpoint or a suburb. It is the second most populated city in Bolivia, mostly Aymara, built in a few decades by migration from the provinces and by mining relocation. The cabin does not leave you in front of El Alto: it leaves you inside it. That is where La Paz makes sense all at once, without anyone having to explain it — it is not a flat city with hills around it, it is a hole, and you are standing on the rim looking in. The way back is by cabin first, with the stop at the old Estación Central railway station, built in 1930, and then on foot, down through the street trade of avenidas Buenos Aires and Tumusla — stalls out to the kerb, shouted prices, aguayos, cables crossing the sky — until the circle closes at the Mercado de las Brujas, the Witches’ Market. There the rule is a single one: explanation first, photo second. What hangs from those stalls is not craftwork, and the guide tells you what it is before you take out your phone.

Before you book: this is the only tour in the catalogue that does not require prior acclimatisation — you can do it the same day you arrive in La Paz. There is no motorised transport: it is around 4 hours on foot and by cable car, between 3,600 and 4,100 m, with the climbs that come with the historic centre; comfortable shoes and water are a good idea.

Rates per person — from USD 28.

Want to come back up to El Alto in the afternoon? See Cholitas Wrestling
Want to add the valleys and the south of the city in a single day? See La Paz in a Day