Drive along the southern arc of Guadalajara’s Periférico (ring road) and you can’t miss it: a steep, built-up hillside rising above the highway, crowned with broadcast antennas.
This is the Cerro del Cuatro, one of the metro area’s highest points and, many say, the most neglected: neighborhoods of thousands of people, widely considered among the poorest in the city.
In a bid to draw this isolated zone into the wider urban area, the Tlaquepaque municipal government wants to run a cable car service (cablebús) up the hillside, linking it to the Mi Macro Periférico bus route and Lines 1 and 4 of the Tren Ligero.
Morena Party Mayor Laura Imelda P
érez Segura has floated the cable car as the answer for streets too steep and congested for buses. But Jalisco Transport Secretary Diego Monraz has pushed back, arguing the municipality has no authority to plan, build and run such a system.
In response, Morena legislator Miguel de la Rosa Figueroa has proposed amending Jalisco’s Mobility Law to give municipalities the power to approve and operate their own transit programs within their territory, without needing the state executive’s sign-off. He points to Mexican Supreme Court rulings that have backed municipal authority in such disputes, and to Mexico City’s cablebús network as proof the system works. In the capital, three lines, about 25 kilometers in total, cut travel times in hard-to-reach zones — a shining example of what de la Rosa calls a real victory in the fight for social equality.
The hill’s history
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Cerro del Cuatro is an extinct volcano on the southern edge of the Guadalajara metro area. It’s named, most accounts say, for the 4th Infantry Battalion under General Álvaro Obregón, which entered the city near the hill on July 8, 1914, during the Mexican Revolution. At the top, Televisa and TV Azteca antennas share space with a popular hiking spot. On a clear day, the views run the length of the city.
The hill’s recent history comes in two chapters. For more than 40 years, families built unauthorized homes up the steep slopes in irregular colonias such as Francisco y Madero and El Refugio. At first there was no drainage, no reliable water and no paved roads. The topography trapped pollution from below, and loose volcanic soil meant flooding and structural risk every rainy season.
Then municipal permits let developers throw up huge housing complexes — Las Terrazas, Pedregal del Bosque, Altos Sur — adding thousands of basic homes and eating what green space remained.
What’s left is now legally protected. Of a 55-hectare parcel set aside for public and educational use, about ten hectares are allotted to the new UdeG campus, CUTlaquepaque. The remaining 45 are zoned as an environmental recovery area, barred from private development, with reforestation underway. Advocates call it Tlaquepaque’s last urban lung.
A lifeline?
For most people, Cerro del Cuatro is just unmemorable scenery and urban sprawl on the way to the Chapala highway and the airport. There’s no incentive to visit the area, and on the wider scale of problems facing the metropolitan area, the cable car issue is probably of zero interest to them.
But for many Cerro del Cuatro residents, the system would represent a lifeline. Cable cars go where buses can’t. In Medellín, Colombia; La Paz, Bolivia; and Mexico City, cable lines have been catalysts of urban integration, reducing lengthy commutes and drawing isolated hillside communities into the formal city.
In the end, the future of the Tlaquepaque cable car will likely hinge on one point: whether the state government and the municipality — currently run by rival political parties — can agree on a legal framework to fund, build and operate the system.
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