Mont Blanc — mountain
Image by Rianne_SchillerMclean from Pixabay

Mont Blanc

  • Elevation4,806 m
  • 2 min read
  • 45.833° N 6.865° E

Interesting facts

  • Marie Paradis became the first woman to reach the summit in 1808, thirty years before Henriette d'Angeville made the second female ascent.
  • In 1893 an observatory was built on the summit ice; by 1906 it was leaning badly and a crevasse soon opened beneath it.
  • In 1960 the pilot Henri Giraud landed an aeroplane on the summit, a strip of snow only about 30 metres long.
  • Two Air India airliners crashed into the massif, in 1950 and 1966; the second killed Homi Bhabha, father of India's nuclear programme.
  • The name Mont Blanc first appeared in print on a map drawn by Pierre Martel in 1744.
  • During the cold wave of January 1893 a temperature of −43 °C was recorded near the summit.
  • In September 2007 a group of twenty people carried a hot tub to the top and set it up on the summit.
  • Also in 2007, helicopters flew Europe's two highest toilets up to the mountain at 4,260 metres.
  • Kilian Jornet holds the fastest known round trip from Chamonix to the top and back, in under five hours.
  • The granite core of the massif, pushed up through older gneiss, hosts at least 68 different mineral species.

Why it is worth it

Mont Blanc is the highest mountain in the Alps and in Europe outside the Caucasus, standing on the border between France and Italy. Its exact height is a moving target, because the summit is a cap of snow and ice that thickens and thins with the weather. Surveys have measured 4,810.02 metres in 2013, a low of 4,805.59 metres in 2023 after a long drought, and 4,807.3 metres in 2025; the rock summit beneath lies at about 4,792 metres, some 40 metres to the west of the ice top. Even the border is unsettled. France claims the whole summit under a treaty of 1796; Italy argues that the frontier follows the watershed, placing the top on the line; official Swiss maps mark the area around the summit as contested.

The first recorded ascent, on 8 August 1786 by Jacques Balmat and the doctor Michel-Gabriel Paccard, answered a reward offered by the Swiss naturalist Horace-Bénédict de Saussure and is traditionally taken as the birth of modern mountaineering. Today around 20,000 people a year climb to the top. The most popular route, the Goûter route, usually takes two days: climbers ride the Tramway du Mont-Blanc from Saint-Gervais to the Nid d'Aigle and pass the Tête Rousse and Goûter huts on the way. It is technically easy but arduous, and one stretch is notoriously dangerous: between the Tête Rousse and Goûter refuges, around the Goûter couloir, 74 people died between 1990 and 2011.

You do not have to climb to reach the high mountain. From Chamonix, the Aiguille du Midi cable car, opened in 1955, rises more than 2,800 metres in about 20 minutes to an upper station at 3,777 metres, with a lift inside the rock to the 3,842-metre summit and a glass box, Step into the Void, hanging over a drop of about a kilometre. In summer the Vallée Blanche cable car floats across the glaciers to Pointe Helbronner on the Italian side, where the Skyway Monte Bianco, opened in 2015, descends in rotating cabins to Entrèves near Courmayeur. Chamonix itself hosted the first Winter Olympic Games.

Beneath the mountain runs the 11.6 km Mont Blanc Tunnel, opened in 1965 between Chamonix and Courmayeur. In 1999 a truck fire inside it killed 39 people, and the tunnel was renovated with computerised detection and additional safety bays. For walkers, the Tour du Mont Blanc circles the whole massif, which straddles France, Italy and Switzerland.

Getting there

The main bases are Chamonix and Saint-Gervais-les-Bains in France and Courmayeur in Italy. The nearest town of any size is Sallanches, about 22 km away; on the Italian side, Aosta is about 37 km. The nearest airport is Annecy (NCY), about 60 km away, and Turin Airport (TRN) is about 93 km.

Plan your visit

We have no confirmed visit data yet. Once it is confirmed, this block also carries the date it was checked.

Nearby places

On these lists

The Most Beautiful Places in Haute-Savoie 6The Most Beautiful Places in Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes 13The Most Beautiful Places in France 179The Most Beautiful Natural Wonders in Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes 6The Most Beautiful Natural Wonders in France 34The Most Beautiful Mountains 91The Most Beautiful Natural Wonders 580

From the encyclopaedia

Mont Blanc is a mountain in the Alps, rising 4,807.3 m above sea level, located right at the Franco-Italian border. It is the highest mountain in Europe outside the Caucasus Mountains, the second-most prominent mountain in Europe, and the 11th most prominent mountain in the world.

Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0

45.83278, 6.86500per Wikidata