[ DISCOVERY · THE DISPATCH ]
The Funicular Villages That Have No Roads, Only Ropes and Cliffs
There are towns where the school run happens by cable car, the groceries arrive up a sheer rock face, and a car is about as useful as a submarine. I went to a few. The quiet alone is worth the trip.
The phrase that sold me on this whole obsession came from a man in a tiny Swiss village, leaning on a cable-car railing, completely deadpan: “The school run? Funicular. Twice a day.” I genuinely thought he was joking. He was not. The kids ride a cable car down a cliff to school and ride it back up at three. That’s just Tuesday for them.
Welcome to the villages with no cars, only funiculars — and ropes, and stairs, and a stubborn refusal to be reached the easy way.
How does a place like this even work
This is the question everyone asks, so let’s get into it. If there’s no road, how does anything happen?
The answer is: slowly, and on rails. A funicular (those two counterweighted carriages on a steep track, one going up as the other comes down) does most of the heavy lifting. Groceries, post, building materials, the occasional sofa, somebody’s nan — all of it goes up the rock face in the same little carriage you ride in. In some places it’s a cable car swinging over a gorge instead. In a few, honestly, it’s just an absurd number of stairs and your own two legs.
What this does to a place is hard to overstate. No traffic. No engine noise. No one circling for parking. Just footsteps and weather and the distant clank of the funicular machinery kicking in.
The villages I’d send you to first
Capri is the famous one, and for once the famous one earns it. The funicolare climbs from Marina Grande up to the main piazzetta in about four minutes, and the island above is functionally car-light — narrow lanes, little electric carts, a lot of walking. Go shoulder season though, August is a crush.
Switzerland is where the concept goes properly extreme. Stoos sits above the Muotathal valley and is reached by the steepest funicular in the world — the carriages literally rotate to keep you level as the gradient changes, it’s mad, I grinned the whole way up. And Gimmelwald, in the Lauterbrunnen valley, is a car-free hamlet you reach by cable car, where the loudest thing is a cowbell and the views of the Eiger and Mönch will genuinely stop you mid-sentence.
Then there’s Civita di Bagnoregio in Italy — no funicular, but it belongs here completely. It’s a crumbling hilltop town connected to the rest of the world by a single long pedestrian footbridge over a ravine, and it’s slowly eroding away, which is why locals call it “the dying town.” You walk in. There is no other way. It is unspeakably beautiful and slightly sad and I loved it.
What you need to know before you go
Pack light. I cannot stress this enough. Whatever the funicular doesn’t carry to your door, you carry — up stairs, along a footbridge, over cobbles a wheely-case will hate. I once dragged a full hard-shell suitcase up to a cliff guesthouse and the owner watched me do it with the expression of a man who has seen this exact mistake a hundred times. Learn from me. Soft bag. One bag.
Check the funicular timetable like it’s a flight, because it basically is. The last carriage of the night is a real deadline. Miss it and your options are a very long walk, a very expensive water taxi, or sleeping where you stand.
And don’t expect a supermarket. These places run on one little shop and whatever came up the cliff this morning. The food is often better for it — smaller, fresher, local — but it’s not a place for a midnight snack run.
What it does to a place — and to you
Spend a couple of days somewhere a car genuinely cannot reach and you start noticing how much of normal life is shaped by the engine. The background drone you never hear until it’s gone. The way streets in a regular town are basically just car-storage with footpaths bolted on the edges. None of that here. The lanes belong to people. Kids play in them. Old men carry chairs out and sit in the middle of what would, anywhere else, be a road.
The whole rhythm of the day reorganises around the funicular. People plan their errands around the timetable. The afternoon carriage coming up the cliff is a small event — you can almost set your watch by who’s on it. There’s a sociability to that I wasn’t expecting. Everyone’s funnelled through the same two carriages, so everyone sort of knows everyone, and a stranger gets noticed and, mostly, looked after.
And it slows you down, like it or not. You can’t nip anywhere. There’s no nipping. You commit to going down the cliff or you don’t, and that small friction makes you do less and notice more. By the second evening I’d stopped reaching for my phone every five minutes, which for me is basically a spiritual achievement.
There’s a flip side, in fairness. These places can feel claustrophobic if you’re the restless type, and a genuine emergency — a medical one, say — is a real concern when the only way down is a carriage on a cable. The residents have systems for it, but it’s worth a sober thought before you romanticise the isolation completely.
Why bother, when you could stay somewhere with, you know, roads? Because there’s a specific peace to a place a car cannot reach. The noise floor drops to almost nothing. Time stretches. You start noticing the funicular’s rhythm, the comings and goings, the way the whole village’s day is shaped by a carriage on a cable. Its hypnotic.
And the school run by cable car? Still the single best commute I’ve ever witnessed.
Go where the only way up is a rope and a cliff, and you’ll remember what quiet actually sounds like.
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