History of the cable way at the Table Mountain

At the end of the decade known as the Roaring Twenties, passengers took the first trip to the top of Table Mountain on October 4, 1929 in a wooden cable car with a tin roof.

Construction of the lower and upper stations, along with a tearoom at the summit, was nothing short of a phenomenal engineering feat, taking two years to complete at the then staggering cost of £60 000 (R1,28m), according to Wahida Parker, md of the Table Mountain Aerial Cableway Company.

The cable car took nearly ten minutes to carry 19 people and a conductor up the 704 metres to the summit. In the early days the company had to have a small budget for silk stockings as ladies tended to snag their hosiery on the fynbos.

Another one of the lesser known fun facts about the cableway is that mountaineer Sir Edmund Hillary, the first person to summit Everest, took a cable car up Table Mountain soon after his historic expedition.

Since then, the cableway has transported over 29 million visitors. “A lot has changed since that first trip in 1929, but the cableway remains one of Cape Town’s biggest tourist attractions, transporting approximately a million people annually and counting,” Wahida concludes.

Cableway 1990 Source: Dirmu Gouws