60 Fun Facts About Alps

The Alps stretch across how many countries, counting the microstates?

The arc runs roughly 1,200 km from Nice on the Mediterranean to Vienna at the edge of the Pannonian Basin, and two of the eight are microstates.

Which microstate holds the smallest share of the Alps, just 0.001% of the range?

Austria has the largest share at 28.7%, ahead of Italy and France; Switzerland, the country most associated with the range, holds only 13.2%.

Ötzi the Iceman was discovered on a glacier at the Austria-Italy border in which year?

Two hikers spotted the body on 19 September 1991 and assumed it was a recently dead mountaineer; it turned out to be Europe's oldest known natural human mummy.

Ötzi's remains are on permanent display in a museum in which city?

A land survey found the body lay 92.56 metres inside Italian territory, which is why the Iceman ended up in South Tyrol's capital rather than in Austria.

Ötzi carried an axe whose blade was made almost entirely of which metal?

The blade is 99.7% pure, and high levels of the same metal plus arsenic in his hair suggest he may have been involved in smelting it.

What evidence convinced researchers that Ötzi was killed by another person?

The projectile point sits in his left shoulder alongside other wounds, making the Iceman one of the world's oldest cold cases.

Hannibal led his army and elephants over the Alps in which year?

Historians still argue over which pass he used, because the only sources are Polybius and Livy, born roughly 20 and 160 years after the event.

Hannibal's crossing of the Alps was part of which conflict?

Before the mountains, his elephants had to be floated across a river on earth-covered rafts so they would think they were still on land.

The first Winter Olympics, in 1924, were held in which Alpine resort?

The French town at the foot of Mont Blanc got the games first; St. Moritz followed in 1928 and Garmisch-Partenkirchen in 1936.

How tall is Mont Blanc, the highest peak in the Alps?

The summit is a thick dome of perennial ice and snow, so its measured height shifts by a few metres from survey to survey.

The first recorded ascent of Mont Blanc took place in which year?

Two men from the valley reached the top on 8 August, and the climb is traditionally treated as the birth of modern mountaineering.

Jacques Balmat made the first ascent of Mont Blanc alongside which doctor?

Saussure, the Geneva naturalist who had offered a reward for the climb, made the ascent himself the following year.

The Mont Blanc Tunnel, opened in 1965, links France with which Italian town?

The 11.6 km road tunnel took eight years to build and remains one of the main routes across the Alps for freight.

What caused the 1999 disaster inside the Mont Blanc Tunnel?

The tunnel was closed for three years and reopened with a parallel escape shaft, extra safety bays and a fire station at its midpoint.

Who led the party that made the first ascent of the Matterhorn in 1865?

He had failed seven times, mostly from the Italian side, before succeeding by the Hörnli ridge above Zermatt on 14 July 1865.

How many of the seven climbers in the 1865 first-ascent party died on the way down the Matterhorn?

The rope broke and Croz, Hadow, Hudson and Lord Francis Douglas fell to the glacier; Douglas's body was never found.

On the Italian side, the Matterhorn is known by what name?

The name descends from the Latin Mons Silvanus, 'forest mountain', which was corrupted over the centuries into the French Cervin.

Which is the largest glacier in the Alps?

About 23 km long and up to 905 metres thick at Konkordiaplatz, it anchors a region that became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2001.

The notorious north face of the Eiger was first climbed in which year?

A German-Austrian party of four topped out on 24 July, the same year an Alpine Journal editor called the face 'an obsession for the mentally deranged'.

Heinrich Harrer's classic book about climbing the Eiger's north face is called what?

The title refers to an ice field near the top of the wall; Harrer made the climb without crampons of his own.

The Eiger, Mönch and Jungfrau are often translated as the Ogre, the Monk and the...?

German folklore has the Monk standing between the Ogre and the Maiden to protect her.

The Jungfrau railway, which climbs to Europe's highest station, opened to tourists in which year?

The 7 km tunnel took 14 years to bore and stops at 3,454 metres, short of the summit its promoter originally planned to reach.

Which pass did Napoleon cross with 40,000 troops in 1800?

The Romans had used the same crossing to reach their north-western provinces, and a hospice for travellers has stood at its summit since 1049.

The Gotthard Base Tunnel, the world's longest railway tunnel, runs for roughly how many kilometres?

It opened in 2016 as the first flat, low-level route through the Alps, and at its deepest point 2,450 metres of rock sit above the track.

At just 984 metres, which is the lowest of the major Alpine passes?

It links Lower Austria with Styria and has carried trade continuously since the 12th century, gaining a railway tunnel in the mid-1800s.

Which is the highest paved road pass in the Alps?

The Savoy pass tops out at 2,770 metres, a few metres higher than Italy's Stelvio, whose road was built in the 1820s.

The northern ramp of the Stelvio Pass is famous for how many numbered hairpin bends?

The Giro d'Italia first crossed it in 1953, when Fausto Coppi beat Hugo Koblet, and Top Gear once called it the greatest driving road in the world.

Which pass carries the E45 motorway between Innsbruck and South Tyrol, a trade route since Roman times?

Maria Theresa had a carriage road laid over it in 1777, and the border barrier there was formally abolished in 1995.

What is the highest mountain in Germany?

At 2,962 metres it straddles the Austrian border and once had a staffed customs post on the summit itself.

What is the highest mountain in Austria?

It rises 3,798 metres above the Pasterze, Austria's longest glacier, and was first climbed in 1800 by a party organised by a prince-bishop.

Which mountain appears on the flag and coat of arms of Slovenia?

Its name means 'three-headed', and it is said every true Slovene should stand on the summit at least once in their life.

Which peak is the highest in the Eastern Alps?

At 4,049 metres it is the only four-thousander east of the Splügen Pass divide, and it was first climbed in 1850.

The Dufourspitze, second-highest summit in the Alps, is the top of which massif?

At 4,634 metres it sits on the Swiss-Italian border and shares a 'crown of peaks' around Zermatt with the Matterhorn.

In its original sense, the word 'alp' refers to what?

Strictly speaking, calling the mountains 'the Alps' is a misnomer: locals used the word for the grazing land where cows spend the summer.

Which river begins as Alpine glacial meltwater, flows through Lake Geneva and on into France?

It is second only to the Nile as a freshwater source for the Mediterranean, and France uses it to cool nuclear power plants.

Which Alpine river drains into the Danube and ultimately the Black Sea?

Alpine rivers end up in four different seas: the Rhine reaches the North Sea and the Ticino feeds the Po and the Adriatic.

The Alps cover about 11% of Europe's surface, but supply up to what share of lowland Europe's water?

Milan alone draws about 80% of its water from Alpine runoff, and at least 550 hydroelectric plants tap the same rivers.

By the 19th century fewer than 100 Alpine ibex survived, all in which national park?

Every ibex in the Alps today descends from that Italian remnant, and males' horns can reach nearly a metre in length.

Alpine marmots can spend up to how many months of the year in hibernation?

They can dig through soil a pickaxe would struggle with, and warn the colony with loud whistles when danger appears.

Along with the golden eagle, which is the largest bird found in the Alps?

Also known as the lammergeier, it nests on rocky ledges up to about 2,400 metres and lives largely on bone marrow.

Zoologically, the chamois of the Alps is classified as what kind of animal?

Smaller than the ibex, chamois live above the tree line across the entire range and are the source of the original 'shammy' leather.

Edelweiss, the emblematic Alpine flower, belongs to which plant family?

Its genus name Leontopodium means 'lion's paw', and the woolly white hairs on its leaves protect it from ultraviolet light and water loss.

The Alpine gentian takes its name from a king of which ancient people?

Forty species of gentian grow in the Alps, and D. H. Lawrence described their blue as 'the smoking blueness of Pluto's gloom'.

Which novel did Mary Shelley conceive during a stormy 1816 stay on the shores of Lake Geneva?

On the same trip Byron wrote 'The Prisoner of Chillon' and Percy Shelley wrote his poem 'Mont Blanc'.

Which 1761 novel by Jean-Jacques Rousseau helped make the Alps fashionable as a place of beauty?

Rousseau's Alpine romance helped launch the Romantic craze that later drew Turner, Wordsworth, Byron and the Shelleys to the mountains.

Who wrote Heidi, the children's classic set in the Swiss Alps?

It was published in two parts in 1880-81 and remains one of the best-selling books ever written.

In Heidi, the girl is taken from her grandfather's mountain hut to which city to be Klara's companion?

She wilts in the city and is eventually sent home; Klara later visits the mountains and learns to walk there.

Which Savoy cheese is made in wheels that can weigh up to 70 kg?

Even a Swiss Emmental wheel tops out around 45 kg; cheesemaking on the summer pastures is one of the region's oldest surviving trades.

Which naturalist, studying rocks near his Neuchâtel home, argued the Alps had once been iced over?

His mid-19th-century paper on glaciation grew into the concept of the ice ages, one of several key geological ideas born in the Alps.

As of 2010, roughly how many visitors did the Alps receive each year?

That is more than eight times the region's resident population of about 14 million; tourism became the dominant industry after World War II.

Which composer said an alphorn tune heard near the Rigi inspired the horn entry in his First Symphony?

He sent Clara the melody as a birthday greeting in 1868, years before the symphony was finished.

The alphorn is prominently featured in advertisements for which product?

The instrument is a straight wooden tube 3 to 4 metres long, and a Roman mosaic from the 2nd century already shows a shepherd playing one.

A Freddie Mercury statue stands on Lake Geneva in which town, where Queen owned a studio?

Vladimir Nabokov also spent his final years there and died in the town in 1977.

How many 'official' Alpine summits of at least 4,000 metres appear on the UIAA list?

Only 29 of them have 300 metres of prominence; Karl Blodig became one of the first to climb every major one, finishing in 1911.

Which Alpine plate collision built the range, according to geologists?

Marine sediments were thrust and folded upward, which is why fossils of sea creatures turn up high on peaks like the Matterhorn.

Which French city is the largest lying within the Alps themselves?

Other Alpine cities over 100,000 include Bolzano, Trento, Lucerne and Innsbruck; Milan and Munich sit on the plains outside.

Which Styrian mountain supplies high-quality iron ore to the steel industry?

Celtic tribes mined Alpine copper in the Hallstatt era, and the Romans dug gold for coins around Bad Gastein.

The February 1999 avalanche that was the deadliest in the Alps for 40 years struck which Austrian village?

That same month avalanches also hit Montroc in France and Evolène in Switzerland.

What is the festive autumn descent of decorated cows from the high pastures called in German-speaking regions?

Cows go up in mid-June and return in mid-September wearing garlands and enormous bells; Schuhplattler is a folk dance.

Romansh, spoken by about 2% of people in southeast Switzerland, is descended mainly from which language?

It is a Rhaeto-Romanic tongue with traces of ancient Celtic and perhaps Etruscan; the Slavic Alps alone have 19 dialects.