If you prefer an urban view to a natural one, then La Paz’s soaring cable car system is for you. This intricate network provides fast and reliable transport between the city’s different neighborhoods, saving you time sitting in traffic while treating you to a stunning view of this chaotic city. Bonus: since La Paz is the highest elevated capital in the world, you’ll also save your lungs and legs from trekking up hills.
The best things in life are free – or almost. A single ticket for La Paz’s cable car system – “Mi Teleférico” or “My Cable Car” – costs just 3 bolivianos, or 33p. Locals, using a new “intelligent ticket”, pay even less.
In exchange, you get access to the world’s largest high-altitude urban cable-car system – which, with the opening of the “Purple Line” two weeks ago, extends to eight lines or 17 miles. Built by Austrian firm Doppelmeyr, this awesome public works project has cost Bolivian taxpayers around $700m (£530m) since its inception in 2014 – and three more lines are envisaged.
Respect to the builders, who’ve managed to weave a network of routes into a teeming, tortuously inclined capital city without knocking down scores of houses or destroying what few green spaces remain.
Engineering apart, “Mi Teleférico” is the best public transport system in the Americas and, short of a vintage Caddy in Havana, probably the best way to see any metropolis.
Spread over a deep, wide canyon, La Paz’s districts range from 3,170m (10,150 feet) to 3,600m (11,800 feet) above sea level. When I first visited in the Nineties, you either walked everywhere – a lung-busting, exhaust fume-sucking endeavour – or jumped in tiny beat-up minibuses and prayed.
Invariably, you stuck to the city centre and your hotel district. Only the intrepid or reckless would hike or ride into the outer burbs – not only because of the poverty, automatically associated with crime, but because travellers are lazy. How many foreign visitors to London trip out to Walthamstow or Uxbridge?
Mi Teleférico opens up, from a condor’s perspective, an entire city, from football stadia to cemeteries to churches, parks and plazas. It provides an unobtrusive angle on the world of the cholas – the mestizo women dressed in bowlers and tiered skirts who sell snacks such as salteñas (pasties), clothes, fresh fruit and veg and sweets on the narrow pavements. It affords a self-satisfied godlike gaze over the stalled traffic that clogs La Paz’s sinuous highways.
Gliding through the sky at a steady 11mph, it allows plenty of time to survey the city’s mountainous bowl and the lunar rock formations that lie around the rim like invading Aymara warriors. It also hints at the social fissures. The Green line, from the upscale and (relatively speaking) low-altitude Zona Sud, passes over a ridge topped by smart, high-walled modern houses.