A 1,200-kilometre arc born where Africa met Eurasia
The Alps stretch roughly 1,200 kilometres across Monaco, France, Switzerland, Italy, Liechtenstein, Germany, Austria, and Slovenia. Tens of millions of years of African–Eurasian collision crumpled marine rock into Europe’s highest extensive ranges, now as famous for tourism as for cheese and timber crafts.
The Alpine arch runs from Nice on the Mediterranean to Trieste on the Adriatic and toward Vienna at the Pannonian Basin’s edge. Extreme shortening from plate collision stacked sediments into today’s peaks. Humans have used the passes since Palaeolithic times; the 5,000-year-old Ötzi mummy emerged from an Austrian–Italian glacier in 1991, and Celtic La Tène culture was established by the sixth century BC. Hannibal’s elephant march remains the ancient crossing everyone remembers.
Village farming, cheese-making, and woodworking still mark Alpine identity, yet twentieth-century tourism—especially after World War II—became the dominant industry. English Alps simply borrows Latin Alpes.
The range forms a crescent about 800 kilometres long and 200 wide, with a mean summit height of 2.5 kilometres, and 82 official summits top 4,000 metres. Mont Blanc, at 4,810 metres, crowns the Western Alps and Piz Bernina, at 4,049, the Eastern; geologist Stefan Schmid places the divide near the Splügen Pass. Austria holds the biggest share of the range, about 29 per cent, ahead of Italy and France. Strictly, the name misleads: an alp is a high summer pasture where herds graze, not a peak.
Passes have carried salt, wine, metals and armies for millennia. Napoleon marched 40,000 troops over the Great St Bernard in 1800, and medieval religious orders built hospices at the tops of many crossings. Nineteenth-century engineers bored through the rock, from the Fréjus rail tunnel of 1871 to the 15-kilometre Gotthard tunnel of 1882. On 1 June 2016 the Gotthard Base Tunnel, at 57.1 kilometres the world's longest railway tunnel, opened the first level route through the mountains. The Col de l'Iseran, at 2,770 metres, is the highest drivable pass.
Source: Alps
