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Alps
Europe's great arc of high peaks, glaciers, and Alpine valleys
The Alps curve for some 1,200 kilometres across the heart of Europe, a crescent of glaciated peaks that has shaped the continent's rivers, borders, and imagination. Here the very word alpine was born, along with the modern sport of mountaineering. From the Mediterranean fringe near Nice the range sweeps through France, Switzerland, Italy, Austria, and Slovenia, its summits crowned by Mont Blanc and the unmistakable pyramid of the Matterhorn. Few mountain regions are so densely woven into daily life, road, rail, and farm alike.
The Alps rose from the collision of the African and European plates, which crushed and stacked ancient seabeds into the folded and overthrust rock that climbers and geologists still puzzle over. Mont Blanc, on the French-Italian border, is the high point at about 4,808 metres, one of dozens of summits above 4,000 metres. Glaciers carved the deep U-shaped valleys and ribbon lakes that define the landscape, and the range feeds major rivers including the Rhine, Rhône, and Po. Eight countries share its slopes.
People have crossed and lived in the Alps since prehistory, as the 5,000-year-old iceman found in a melting glacier attests, and Hannibal famously led elephants over a high pass. Alpine passes funnelled trade and armies for millennia, and tunnels now thread beneath them. The nineteenth century turned the range into the cradle of recreational climbing and, later, of winter tourism, an industry that today reckons with shrinking glaciers and shorter snow seasons even as millions arrive each year.