Chiatura Cable Cars

Chiatura is the only town in Georgia where public transport goes up and down rather than along. The town sits in a canyon of the Kvirila, the walls rise a hundred to two hundred metres, and the residential districts are on the plateaus above. Walking up takes half an hour; the cable car takes two minutes.

It all began with manganese. In 1879 the poet Akaki Tsereteli publicised the industrial value of the local ore, and within twenty-five years Chiatura was producing roughly 60 per cent of the world's manganese. The mines still work, and the gorge walls carry conveyors, ore bunkers and grey spoil heaps.

The ropeway network opened in 1954, because there was no other practical way to get miners to the workings. It grew to seventeen lines and ran for nearly fifty years on original equipment. From 2017 the state began replacing it: a central four-line hub entered service in September 2021, a further line was added in early 2025, and some routes remain closed. The old square cabins no longer run, and several historic stations are marked for preservation.

What you actually see today:

• the new cabins in service, free to ride, from the centre up to the upper districts

• abandoned stations — concrete towers, rusted winding gear, broken glass

• a 1950s Soviet town centre on the canyon floor: theatre, park, stadium

Chiatura is not a pretty town and does not pretend to be. It is worth the detour as an industrial landscape, and as a place where a Soviet engineering answer to an awkward geography is still doing a daily job.

For a resident this is not a ride but a commute. The cabins were free from the start and are still free, and people use them to reach the shops, the school and the cemetery. The old system is still called Stalin's ropeway locally, because it was conceived in the last years of his rule — and until 2021 you could genuinely travel in a cabin riveted together in the 1950s.