Sky-high in Caracas.

• Author: Luxner, Larry
• Position: !Ojo!

AFTER FIFTEEN YEARS of neglect, the Caracas teleferico is finally up and running.

That's great news for tourists as well as residents of Venezuela's capital city, which could certainly use a lift these days.

Five years ago, a private consortium known as Inversora Turistica Caracas S.A. (ITC) won a thirty-year concession to operate the famous funicular linking Caracas with the Hotel Humboldt, located atop Mount Avila at an altitude of over seven thousand feet above sea level.

The Humboldt, a twelve-story, two hundred-foot-high cylinder visible from nearly anywhere in Caracas on a clear day, has been abandoned since its closure in 1987. That's also when the old state-owned teleferico itself stopped operating, after having been in service from 1956 to the early 1970s and again briefly during the mid-1980s.

The new teleferico was inaugurated in February 2002 and already whisks an average fifty thousand passengers a month up and down the mountainside. Dubbed Avila Magica by its owners, the modern system boasts eighty-four standard cabins that hold eight people each, plus three VIP, one emergency, and two cargo cabins. Every five seconds, another cabin leaves the Mariperez station for the fifteen-minute climb, during which visitors can enjoy spectacular panoramas of Caracas and its many suburbs.

The funicular--whose capacity is two thousand passengers per hour--rises a steep thirty-six-hundred feet over a distance of just over two miles and was built by Doppelmayr Cable Car GmbH, an Austrian manufacturer that has installed almost three hundred funiculars in sixty-eight countries, including Colombia, Costa Rica, Brazil, and Spain.

During the week, the teleferico is nearly deserted; it's almost as if visitors have the mountain to themselves. On weekends, however, Avila Magica is jammed with families with small children, as well as tourists.

Visitors currently pay 15,000 bolivars (about $7) per person to Lake the virtually noiseless ride up to the top, which is at least 10 degrees Celsius cooler than in the city. Once there, they can enjoy a...