where is the french alps located?
France
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 Access into the mountains is facilitated by cable cars , mountain railways and mountain huts which offer overnight refuge to climbers and skiers . The long @-@ distance Tour du Mont Blanc hiking trail circumnavigates the whole massif in an 11 @-@ day trek of 170 kilometres ( 110 mi ) . The Mont Blanc Tunnel connects the French town of Chamonix on the northern side with the Italian town of Courmayeur in the south . The high mountains have provided many opportunities for scientific research , including neutrino measurements within the Tunnel and impacts of climate change on its highest slopes . Recent rises in average temperatures have led to significant glacial retreat across the massif and an awareness of the need for better environmental protection , including a call for World Heritage Site status . 

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 Not only does the massif form a watershed between the vast catchments of the Rhône and Po rivers , as well as a tripoint between France , Italy and Switzerland , but it also marks a border between two climate regions by separating the northern and western Alps from the southern Alps . The mountains of the massif consists mostly of granite and gneiss rocks , and at high altitudes the vegetation is an arctic @-@ alpine flora . 

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 The valleys that delimit the massif were used as communication routes by the Romans until they left around the 5th century AD . The region has remained of some military importance through to the mid @-@ 20th century . A peasant farming economy operated within these valleys for many centuries until the glaciers and mountains were discovered by the outside world in the 18th century . Word of these impressive sights began to spread , and Mont Blanc was finally climbed in 1786 , marking the start of the sport of mountaineering . The region is now a major tourist destination , drawing in over six million visitors per year . It provides a wide range of opportunities for outdoor recreation and activities such as sight @-@ seeing , hiking , rock climbing , mountaineering and skiing . Around one hundred people a year die across its mountains and , occasionally , bodies have been lost and entombed in its glaciers for decades . 

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 Amongst many other notable visitors were : Goethe ( 1779 ) ; Chateaubriand ( 1805 ) ; Madame de Staël ; Victor Hugo ; Louis Pasteur and Franz Liszt ( 1836 ) , plus two successive wives of Napoleon Bonaparte : Joséphine de Beauharnais ( 1810 ) and Marie Louise of Austria ( 1814 ) . In 1849 , John Ruskin spent a month in Chamonix , from where he painted some of the massif 's mountains before undertaking the Tour of Mont Blanc . When Savoy was eventually annexed to France in 1860 , Napoleon III and Empress Eugénie visited the region to mark the event and undertook to enhance road access leading to the end of the Arve valley . 

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 The Mont Blanc massif is now a significant tourist destination . The region attracts over six million people per annum , with around one in five gaining access to its slopes by means of mechanical infrastructure ( cable cars or funicular railways ) . Some surveys have shown that tourists mostly come to the Mont Blanc massif and its environs for winter sports such as skiing as well as summer outdoor activities like hiking , climbing and cycling . 
