The Masada Cable Car

Boarding is at the eastern complex, reached from Route 90 along the Dead Sea shore, which the parks authority puts about 18 km south of Ein Gedi or 12 km from Ein Bokek. The lower station is not a shed at the end of a car park: it was built into the visitor centre, and the same building holds the ticket office, the Yigael Yadin Masada Museum, the film halls, shops and covered parking.

The line itself is short and unusually bare. Hebrew Wikipedia gives 900 metres of cable, a height difference of 290 metres, a top speed of up to eight metres per second and a throughput of 1,200 passengers an hour, with the two station buildings covering roughly 3,000 square metres between them. English Wikipedia records the cars leaving every fifteen minutes. There is no support pylon anywhere on the span: the two cars pass each other in mid-air over open desert, with nothing between the stations.

The upper station is the piece most people misread from below. It does not stand on the summit. The Remontées Mécaniques report on the tramway notes that it sits a few metres under the plateau, cantilevered out over the rock face, so that it interrupts the skyline as little as possible. Passengers leave across a suspension bridge to the Snake Path Gate, and because that bridge replaced the old staircase there are no steps at the top.

• 900 m of cable, 290 m of height difference, no intermediate tower
• Up to 8 metres per second, and about 3 minutes station to station
• Cars every 15 minutes during opening hours
• Exit at the top by suspension bridge, not by steps

The claim is about altitude, not about depth or drop. Masada stands roughly 450 metres above the Dead Sea shore on the parks authority's own figure, and yet its summit is only tens of metres above sea level, because the shore it rises from is one of the lowest points of dry land on earth. So the tramway climbs 290 metres and still finishes barely above the datum: 257 metres below sea level at the bottom, 33 metres above it at the top.

Who says it matters more than the number. Hebrew Wikipedia states it flatly, and cites the elevations. English Wikipedia repeats it. Remontées Mécaniques, a specialist ropeway site, puts it more carefully, describing the machine as the one with the lowest bottom station in the world rather than as the lowest ropeway outright. No body certifies records of this kind, and the parks authority, which would have every commercial reason to print it, does not.

The technical figures need the same handling. English Wikipedia's account rests on a single travel aggregator, and it attaches the 900 metre length and the 290 metre rise to the 1971 line. Hebrew Wikipedia, citing contemporary press reports, gives the 1971 line as 840 metres, running from 250 metres below sea level to 18 metres above. Read the two sets as the new machine and the old one, which fits the parks authority's statement that the upper station was moved when the tramway was replaced.

The idea surfaced in 1955, alongside the first plans for a hotel at Ein Bokek, as a cable railway that would carry guests north to the rock. In 1963 the management of the Egged bus co-operative proposed a cable car up the eastern face, and the Ministry of Tourism turned it down: the point of Masada, at that date, was held to be the climb. During Yigael Yadin's excavations the Engineering Corps did run an electric cable railway up the western side from the diggers' camp, but that was for hauling equipment, not people.

In October 1966 a committee of the parks authority, the Tamar Regional Council and the transport and tourism ministries settled on a compromise that now sounds absurd: a cable car from the eastern side to a plaza on the west, from which visitors would walk up the Roman ramp. Driving vehicles onto the mountain had been ruled out as damaging, and a road linking the two sides was beyond the budget. The design called for 20 small cabins carrying four people each. The tender that went out at the end of 1966 attracted no bids at all, and the job was retendered for construction only, with operation left to the parks authority.

Then the Six Day War reordered the queue, and a cable car on Mount Hermon took priority. In February 1968 Yadin complained in print that everything his expedition had uncovered was going to waste for want of a lift up the mountain. A backer was found that July, the American Jewish businessman Arnold Kagan, and by then the plan had changed again: the line would go straight to the top. The opponents were not quiet about it. Yehuda Almog asked whether people did not understand that Masada had to be taken on foot, that the cliffs, the chasms, the rock-cut cisterns and the Roman camps ringing the mountain had to be seen with one's own eyes, and how anyone would see all that from inside a cable car cabin.

Building started in February 1970. The Swiss firm Brändle did the work with an Israeli contractor named Fogtsh, and the design and construction were in the hands of the Hungarian engineer Georg Sashegy, who had also built the cable car at Rosh Hanikra. The line opened on 11 February 1971 at a cost of more than a million lira, with a fare of four lira for an adult and three for a child. The Minister of Religious Affairs, Zerach Warhaftig, asked that it be kept still on Shabbat out of respect for the dead of Masada. The request was refused, and the cable car has run on Saturdays ever since.

The alignment stayed. Almost everything else went. Hebrew Wikipedia records that the mechanical systems were bought from Von Roll Holding of Switzerland and the cars were replaced, and that the upper station was moved and a suspension bridge built so that visitors with limited mobility could enter the site without climbing steps. The parks authority describes the old machine as one that carried a limited number of people to a point below the summit, from which they had to walk up a staircase, and says the replacement was driven by growing visitor numbers.

The pylon went too, and that is the engineering change a passenger can see. Because the new tramway has no tower to pass, the carriage and hanger can close completely around the two track ropes and the haul rope, which removes the possibility of a cabin falling through a derailment. The Remontées Mécaniques report adds the details the operator does not publish: the cabins are by Gangloff of Bern, the drive is at the lower station and the tension is taken by counterweight at the upper one, and one of the cabins from the 1971 line was kept at the bottom station as a memento.

The changeover was not a single day. Ynet reported on 12 March 2001 that the new tramway had already been built and run in, that specialists brought from Switzerland would take three weeks to dismantle the old one, and that the new machine could move about 1,200 people an hour in groups of 80, against 40 to a cabin and 600 an hour before. The same report put the number of Israelis and tourists who had visited Masada by then at more than 10 million.

The most recent work is electronic rather than mechanical. The parks authority says the cable car's electronic system was replaced in 2020, and that inspections run continuously to the European ropeway standard required by the manufacturers, with an annual test before a licence is issued. Its page records the last annual test as January 2021, by a Technion-certified inspector, with a permit issued by the Ministry of Transport. The page was updated at the end of December 2025 and still gives that date, so read it as the most recent inspection the authority has published rather than as this year's.

• Kept: the route, and the eastern approach from Route 90
• Replaced: the mechanical systems (Von Roll), the cabins (Gangloff of Bern), the upper station
• Removed: the support pylon and the staircase at the top
• Added: the suspension bridge into the Snake Path Gate, and in 2020 a new electronic system

The cable car is not covered by the park ticket, and the English version of the parks authority's site is unhelpful about what it costs: its price table is headed 'Entrance fee No cable car' and lists ₪37 for an adult, ₪21 for a child, ₪31 for a student or an adult in a group, ₪18 for a child in a group and ₪19 for an Israeli senior citizen, with no cable car row anywhere. The Hebrew price table on the same site carries two more tabs. A one-way ride, stated as not including entry, is ₪32 for an adult and ₪16 for a child. A return ride is ₪54 and ₪32. That makes an adult who wants to ride up and down ₪91 all in, which is exactly the figure the authority quotes for its sunrise cable car package.

Hours are the park's hours, minus an hour. In summer the site opens 08:00 to 17:00 Sunday to Thursday and on Saturday, and to 16:00 on Fridays and holiday eves; in winter those become 16:00 and 15:00. Entry to the cable car closes one hour before the time printed, so the useful number on a summer Friday is 15:00. The two parks authority pages disagree about Yom Kippur eve: the English site gives 08:00 to 12:00 and the Hebrew site 08:00 to 13:00.

The sunrise everybody photographs is not this service. Regular operation begins at 08:00, long after the sun is up. What the authority sells separately is a booked ascent called 'Sunrise for everyone', running on set Friday mornings at 05:30, 06:30 and 07:30, paid for in advance, at ₪91 for an adult, ₪53 for a child up to 18 and ₪46 for an Israeli senior citizen, all inclusive of entry and a return ride. It boards only from Masada East on Route 90; guests at the Masada West campsite on the Arad side cannot reach it.

The combination most walkers want is a climb up and a ride down, and the authority allows for it: people who come up the Snake Path can buy a descent ticket at the top without booking ahead. That matters, because the path shuts for ascent by mid-morning in hot weather, and at 07:00 in extreme summer heat, while the cable car keeps running to the published closing time.