Four people were injured and around 100 were left stranded atop a mountain in northwest Italy on Tuesday after a cable car accident, authorities said. The visitors stuck on the mountaintop were later evacuated by helicopter.

No one was seriously injured following the incident on the Macugnaga cable car, which travels up to the Moro Pass at an altitude of 2,800 meters (9,000 feet) near the Swiss border, a spokesman for the Alpine rescue services told the Agence France-Press news agency.

"It appears that the cabin arrived at the top station at excessive speed, which caused the accident," the service said in a statement.

In a separate statement, the fire service said the accident involved two cabins, which "impacted the structures of the upper and lower stations." 

Three of the 15 passengers in the upper cabin were hurt, along with an operator at the lower station, it said.

The crash happened at about 11:30 a.m. local time. Authorities said it took about three hours for all of those stranded to be evacuated by helicopter.

Filippo Besozzi, administrator of the company that manages the cable car, told the ANSA news agency that the most seriously injured was a 59-year-old man who hurt his arm.

He said there had been a "technical problem" and the cable car did not slow down properly as it entered the station, and hit a barrier.

He said there was no significant damage to the cable car, which was renovated in 2023, but it was undergoing checks.

The incident comes at the peak of the ski season, when many Italians and tourists flock to the mountains for the Christmas and New Year's holidays.

In April, a cable car carrying tourists south of Naples crashed to the ground after a cable snapped, killing four people, officials said at the time. That accident happened on Monte Faito, in the town of Castellammare di Stabia — just a week after the cable car, popular for its views of Mount Vesuvius and the Bay of Naples, reopened for the season.

Those crashes followed a deadly incident in 2021, when a cable car taking visitors to a mountaintop view overlooking Lake Maggiore in northern Italy plummeted to the ground, killing 14 people. Only one passenger, a young child, survived.