The Himalayas win almost every head-to-head with the Alps. Their highest summit, Mount Everest, stands at 8,848.86 m (2020 Nepal–China survey), nearly twice the height of Mont Blanc, which French surveys put at about 4,805–4,810 m depending on its ice cap (4,807.3 m in 2025). The Himalayan arc runs about 2,400 km across Pakistan, India, Nepal, Bhutan and China, double the roughly 1,200 km of the Alpine arc from Nice to Vienna, which crosses eight countries. The Himalayas also hold far more ice and more people: about 53 million live in them, against some 14 million in the Alps (2010). The Alps win on two counts. Their mountain building started earlier, and they were climbed and settled first: Mont Blanc was summited in 1786, Everest in 1953.
Which is higher, Mont Blanc or Mount Everest?
Everest is higher by more than 4 km. The joint Nepalese and Chinese survey of 2020 gave its summit as 8,848.86 m (29,031 ft), and it sits on the China–Nepal border in the Mahalangur Himal. The Himalayas have more than 100 peaks above 7,200 m. Ten of the world’s fourteen “eight-thousanders” recognised by the UIAA are Himalayan, among them Kangchenjunga (8,586 m), the highest point in India, and Nanga Parbat (8,125 m), which marks the range’s western end above the Indus. The other four, including K2, are in the neighbouring Karakoram, which most geographers treat as a separate range.
Mont Blanc, on the French–Italian border above Chamonix and Courmayeur, is the highest mountain in the Alps and in Europe outside the Caucasus. Its height changes because the summit is a cap of ice and snow. IGN, the French national mapping agency, and expert surveyors measured 4,807.40 m in 2002; later surveys found 4,808.75 m in 2005 and 4,810.02 m in 2013, then a low of 4,805.59 m in 2023 after 18 months of drought. The bare rock summit lies lower, at about 4,792 m and some 40 m to the west. France and Italy have long disagreed about who owns the summit area. In all, the Alps have 82 peaks above 4,000 m, including the Dufourspitze of Monte Rosa (4,634 m) and the Matterhorn (4,478 m). Their mean summit height is about 2.5 km.
The gap is bigger than the summit figures suggest because of where the snow line sits. In the Himalayas, which lie close to the Tropic of Cancer, permanent snow begins at about 5,500 m, already higher than Mont Blanc’s summit. Climbers on the Nepalese side of Everest set up base camp above 5,000 m. That is roughly the height of the top of the Alps, and they still have roughly 3.5 km or more to climb.
Which range is longer and wider, the Alps or the Himalayas?
The Himalayas are about twice as long. They curve west-northwest to east-southeast for some 2,400 km, from Nanga Parbat near the northernmost bend of the Indus to Namcha Barwa inside the great bend of the Yarlung Tsangpo in Tibet. They are 350 km wide in the west and 151 km in the east. To the north the range drops onto the Tibetan Plateau; to the south it falls to the Indo-Gangetic Plain.
The Alps form a crescent of about 1,200 km along their arc, running from the Mediterranean coast near Nice, around the Po basin and on to Vienna and the edge of the Pannonian Basin, with a southeastern branch towards Trieste and Slovenia. They are usually about 200 km wide, and up to 300 km between Bavaria and northern Italy. The area covered by the Alpine Convention, the treaty protecting the range that came into force in 1995, is 190,717 km² and includes 5,867 municipalities. Austria holds the largest share of the range (28.7%), followed by Italy (27.2%), France (21.4%) and Switzerland (13.2%). Germany, Slovenia, Liechtenstein and Monaco hold the rest.
Politically the Himalayas are more complicated. The range crosses five countries, and in Kashmir its sovereignty is disputed among India, Pakistan and China. Its western end lies in Pakistani-administered Gilgit-Baltistan, and much of the southwest is Indian-administered Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh. In the Alps, by contrast, the best-known border disagreement covers about 65 hectares around Mont Blanc’s summit, which France and Italy each interpret differently.
Which is older, and how did the Alps and Himalayas form?
Both ranges belong to the Alpide belt, a chain of mountains that runs from Gibraltar through the Alps and the Himalayas to Indonesia. All of it rose as the Tethys Ocean was squeezed shut between the old supercontinents of Laurasia and Gondwana. The Alps started first. Their main collision, between the African and Eurasian plates, began in the late Cretaceous. It pushed marine sediments up into stacked folds and thrust sheets, called nappes, which make the Alps a layer cake of European, African and former ocean-floor rock. Mont Blanc is older still at its core: it is a body of granite that was forced up during the Variscan mountain building of the late Palaeozoic and then lifted again by the Alpine collision.
The Himalayas began when India arrived. After breaking away from Gondwana, the Indian plate moved north at about 20 cm a year, which the geologists Frisch, Meschede and Blakey describe as faster than any plate moves today. Its northwestern corner first touched Eurasia about 55 million years ago, and the ocean between them had closed by about 40 million years ago. India’s crust was too thick and buoyant to sink, so its upper layers peeled off and piled up into nappes. The geophysicist Peter Molnar has described most of the Himalayas as slices of rock that were once the top of India’s crust.
The biggest difference today is that the Himalayas are still rising quickly. The Indian plate still moves north at about 67 mm a year. About 20 mm of that is taken up along the Himalayan front, which lifts the range by about 5 mm a year and causes frequent earthquakes. At Nanga Parbat and Namcha Barwa, rock that was once buried deep is coming up at about 7 mm a year. The Alpine collision is still active too, but the Alps have been worn down by glaciers for much longer. Ice-age glaciers carved troughs such as the Rhône and Inn valleys, the Inn valley still showing the terraces left by successive ice ages.
Which holds more ice, Alpine or Himalayan glaciers?
The Himalayas hold far more ice. The range has about 15,000 glaciers storing roughly 12,000 km³ of fresh water. Together with the other high ranges of central Asia, it is often called the “Third Pole”, the largest store of ice outside Antarctica and the Arctic. Among its best-known glaciers are the Khumbu below Everest, the Gangotri in Uttarakhand, one of the primary sources of the Ganges, and the Zemu in Sikkim. Meltwater from around the range feeds the Indus, the Ganges and the Tsangpo–Brahmaputra, whose combined basins are home to about 600 million people.
Alpine glaciers are much smaller, and their shrinking has been measured for longer. They covered 1,817 km² in 1876 and 1,342 km² in 1973. Austria has lost 40% of its glacier ice since 1850 and Switzerland 30%. In the 1840s the naturalist Louis Agassiz measured the Unteraar Glacier moving about 100 m a year, and there is now a permanent research station under the Jungfraujoch. The Himalayas are losing ice too: studies cite a fall of about 13% in glacier cover over 40–50 years, and mass loss has speeded up since 1975.
Which has more people and visitors, the Alps or the Himalayas?
The Himalayas have more residents, and the Alps have more visitors. About 53 million people live in the Himalayas. Kathmandu, Nepal’s capital, is the largest city in the range, and towns such as Shimla, the British Raj’s summer capital, and Dharamsala, home of the Tibetan government in exile, stand on its Indian slopes. The Alps had about 14 million residents in 2010, but they receive about 120 million visitors a year. That makes tourism the main Alpine industry. Resorts such as Chamonix, Davos, Saalbach, Oberstdorf and Cortina d’Ampezzo each record more than a million visitors a year.
The Alps also invented winter sports tourism. St. Moritz held a figure skating championship in 1882, and the first ski lift was built above Grindelwald in 1908. Chamonix hosted the first Winter Olympics in 1924, and Alpine resorts have hosted the Games many times since, from St. Moritz in 1928 and 1948 to Turin in 2006. Himalayan tourism is mostly about trekking and pilgrimage. The Khumbu region below Everest is a major trekking area, and Uttarakhand’s Char Dham shrines at Gangotri, Yamunotri, Badrinath and Kedarnath draw Hindu pilgrims. Several summits are closed to climbers because they are sacred, including Machapuchare, Nanda Devi and Gangkhar Puensum in Bhutan, a strong candidate for the highest unclimbed mountain in the world.
Which was climbed first: Mont Blanc in 1786 or Everest in 1953?
The Alps were climbed first, by 167 years. Jacques Balmat and the doctor Michel-Gabriel Paccard reached the top of Mont Blanc on 8 August 1786, in response to a reward offered by the Genevan scientist Horace-Bénédict de Saussure. Their climb is traditionally treated as the start of modern mountaineering. The “golden age of alpinism” followed in the mid-19th century and ended with the Matterhorn. Edward Whymper’s party reached its summit from Zermatt in 1865, but four of the seven climbers died on the way down. More than 500 climbers are estimated to have died on the Matterhorn since.
The Himalayas took several generations more. In 1895 Albert Mummery and two Gurkhas, Ragobir Thapa and Goman Singh, died on Nanga Parbat in the first recorded attempt on an eight-thousander. On Everest, George Mallory and Andrew Irvine disappeared high on the north side on 8 June 1924. The first eight-thousander was finally climbed on 3 June 1950, when the French climbers Maurice Herzog and Louis Lachenal reached the top of Annapurna. Edmund Hillary of New Zealand and Tenzing Norgay, a Sherpa climber from Nepal, reached the top of Everest at 11:30 am on 29 May 1953 by the South Col route. Today Everest has more traffic than the early climbers could have imagined. On 23 May 2010, 169 people reached the summit, more than in the 31 years after 1953 combined. By May 2024, 340 people had died on the mountain.
The two ranges are also linked by a person: Reinhold Messner, born in 1944 in the German-speaking Alpine province of South Tyrol in Italy, became the first to climb all fourteen eight-thousanders in 1986, without supplementary oxygen. For more on the individual summits, read our guides to Mont Blanc, the White Mountain of the Alps and the Matterhorn’s pyramid above Zermatt, or see how Everest’s summit is measured in how tall Mount Everest really is.