Topographic map of the Alps: whose map are you looking at?

What is the topographic map of the Alps?

There is no such thing as a single topographic map of the Alps. The range crosses Austria, France, Germany, Italy, Liechtenstein, Monaco, Slovenia and Switzerland, the eight states that make up the Alpine Convention, and mapping a country's own territory is a national responsibility everywhere in Europe. Each country's national mapping agency surveys its own share of the mountains and publishes its own official map, to its own specification.

Traverse ships four of those national maps, for the Alpine parts of Switzerland, France, Austria and Germany: swisstopo, France's Plan IGN, Austria's basemap.at and Germany's BKG TopPlusOpen. Together they cover the ground the Mont Blanc massif, the Bernese Oberland, the Valais 4000ers, the Hohe Tauern and the Bavarian border peaks sit on.

It does not cover Italy, Slovenia or Monaco. Liechtenstein is drawn on the Swiss edition, because swisstopo maps it together with Switzerland. If a route crosses into Italy or Slovenia, the map on this page stops at or just beyond the border, and you will need that country's own national map, which Traverse does not yet include.

How each map is made, and which one is which

Every national mapping agency in Europe works the same way in outline: aerial photography, LiDAR and field survey feed a national geographic database, and the map is drawn from that database rather than surveyed sheet by sheet. Where the four agencies differ is in style. swisstopo draws glaciers white with blue contours and shades rock with fine black hachures. France's Plan IGN keeps a grey relief base under thin brown contours and barely distinguishes ice from rock by colour. Austria's basemap.at leans on shaded relief instead of contour lines and fills glaciers and lakes pale turquoise. Germany's BKG TopPlusOpen sits closer to the Swiss style, with brown contours over pale relief.

None of these styles is wrong. Each agency draws to its own national specification, which is why the same summit can look like a different mountain depending on which edition you are looking at. Here is who maps what.

• swisstopo (Switzerland) (Multi-scale, digital): The Swiss national map, redrawn at every zoom from the same survey. White glaciers with blue contours, black rock hachures, red lines for cableways. This is the Switzerland edition on this page.
• Plan IGN (France) (Multi-scale, digital): France's national digital map, open licence since 2021. Grey relief base, thin brown contours, hachured rock. This is the France edition on this page.
• basemap.at (Austria) (Multi-scale, digital): Austria's official web map, produced by the Austrian federal states with partner agencies and published as open data. Shaded relief in place of contour lines, glaciers and lakes filled pale turquoise. This is the Austria edition on this page.
• BKG TopPlusOpen (Germany) (Multi-scale, digital): Germany's open national map, published by the Federal Agency for Cartography and Geodesy. Only a small sliver of Alpine Germany exists, around the Wetterstein and the Zugspitze. This is the Germany edition on this page.
• IGM (Italy) (1:25 000 / 1:50 000): Italy's national map, published by the Istituto Geografico Militare. It covers the Italian side of Mont Blanc, the Matterhorn and the Dolomites. Not part of Traverse.
• GURS (Slovenia) (1:25 000 / 1:50 000): Slovenia's national map, published by the Surveying and Mapping Authority, covering the Julian Alps and Triglav. Not part of Traverse.
• Liechtenstein and Monaco (No dedicated hiking edition): Liechtenstein is mapped by swisstopo together with Switzerland, so it appears on the Swiss edition on this page. Monaco has almost no mountain terrain of its own and is not covered.

How to read these maps

The legend below shows swisstopo, the Swiss national map, because the button under every symbol jumps the live map to Switzerland. Every symbol here has an equivalent on the other three editions, drawn in that country's own style, which the paragraphs above describe. Switch the edition above the map to compare them directly.

• Brown contour lines: Each line joins points of equal height. The interval is usually 10 or 20 metres depending on the zoom, and every fourth or fifth line is drawn thicker and carries its height in metres. Lines packed close together mean steep ground.
• Blue contours on white: On glaciers and permanent snow the ground turns white and the contours turn blue. A route that crosses blue contours is on ice, which means rope, crampons and crevasse rescue skills, whichever country's map you happen to be reading.
• Wavy blue lines across the ice: A texture of curved blue lines drawn into the glacier surface, following the direction the ice flows. It is a drawing of a pattern, not a survey of individual crevasses, and it dates from whenever the sheet was last resurveyed.
• Dense black hachures on rock: Cliffs, ridges and rock faces are drawn as fields of short black strokes rather than contour lines. The denser the hachures, the steeper the rock. A path that crosses this pattern is a scramble or a climb, not a walk.
• Pink line along a ridge: An administrative boundary. On the ridge above Zermatt it is the Swiss/Italian border; above Grindelwald the same style of line marks the boundary between the cantons of Bern and Valais. Ground beyond an international border is often tinted the same pink.
• Green fill in the valleys: Forest and cultivated valley floor. Above it the colour fades to open pasture, then to the white and grey of rock and permanent snow. The upper edge of the green is a quick way to judge where shelter ends.
• Blue lines for streams and rivers: Watercourses, drawn solid where they run year-round. Glacier-fed streams swell through the afternoon as the day's melt arrives, which matters if a route needs a crossing done early rather than late.
• Thin black dashed lines: Footpaths. The line alone does not say whether the ground underfoot is a gentle track or an exposed scramble with a chain, so check a current route description before committing to steep terrain shown this way.
• Small black triangle: A mountain hut or cabin. Swiss huts range from a wardened SAC hut serving dinner in season to an unwardened bivouac with a stove and some mattresses, and the symbol alone does not say which, so check before you rely on one.
• Straight red lines with round stations: Cable cars, gondolas and chairlifts. Useful for planning an approach or a descent, and in summer a reminder that you are inside or beside a working ski area rather than open mountain.

1. Work out which country you are in: The edition switch above the map is not cosmetic. Contour interval, colours, boundary style and even the sea-level datum change at the border, so the first useful thing to establish is which national convention you are reading.
2. Read the shape first: Zoom out until the hillshade or relief carries the terrain: where the ridges run, which way the glacier drains, where the passes sit. Austria's basemap.at leans on this step particularly hard, since it has no contour lines to fall back on.
3. Then read the steepness: Zoom in until contours appear and look at their spacing along your line. Evenly spaced and wide apart is a walk. Bunched together is steep. On the Swiss and German maps, merging into black or grey hachures is a wall.
4. Cross-check at the border: A route that crosses from one country's map into another's will not line up perfectly. Contour lines, path networks and even summit heights can differ slightly between two national surveys of the same ridge. Treat the seam as a place to double-check, not a printing error.

Browse the live Switzerland map

This page loads the real swisstopo, IGN, basemap.at and BKG tiles in an interactive map, with Switzerland and France and Austria and Germany and shortcuts to Matterhorn (Valais, Switzerland), Eiger, above Grindelwald (Bernese Oberland, Switzerland), Piz Bernina (Graubünden, Switzerland), Mont Blanc (Haute-Savoie, France), Grossglockner (Hohe Tauern, Austria), Zugspitze (Wetterstein, Germany).

Mountain map words, in three languages

The Alps speak German, French and Italian, sometimes on the same ridge, and each country's map labels the same kind of feature in its own language. Knowing the pattern helps even where you cannot read a whole sentence.

Hütte · Refuge · Rifugio

Mountain hut

Biwak · Bivouac · Bivacco

Unstaffed emergency shelter

Gletscher · Glacier · Ghiacciaio

Glacier

Joch · Col · Passo

Pass

Grat · Arête · Cresta

Ridge

Spitze / Horn · Pointe / Aiguille · Punta / Cima

Peak, summit

Gipfel · Sommet · Vetta

Summit

Alm / Alp · Alpage · Alpe

Summer pasture

Wand · Paroi · Parete

Rock wall, face

Scharte · Brèche · Bocchetta

Notch in a ridge

See · Lac · Lago

Lake

Tal · Vallée · Valle

Valley

Bach · Ruisseau · Torrente

Mountain stream

Firn · Névé · Nevaio

Old compacted snow

Steig · Sentier · Sentiero

Path, trail

Seilbahn · Téléphérique · Funivia

Cable car

Wald · Forêt · Bosco

Forest

Geröll · Éboulis · Ghiaione

Scree

Mont Blanc massif: France's map and Switzerland's, side by side

Mont Blanc's summit sits on the France/Italy border, and the massif around it reaches into Switzerland too. France's Plan IGN draws it as grey shaded relief with thin brown contours, and does not give the ice a separate colour: rock and glacier are mostly told apart by the pattern of hachures rather than by a change of hue.

swisstopo's map extends a considerable distance beyond Switzerland's own border for context, and includes the Mont Blanc massif even though the summit itself is French. Its version uses the full Swiss convention instead: white glacier with blue contours, black rock hachures, and the pink tint of a foreign border running along the ridge.

Compare the two editions over the same peaks and you can see exactly what changes when the same mountain crosses from one agency's convention to another's, even before it crosses an actual border.

What no national map tells you

• It shows the ground, not conditions. Snow cover, avalanche danger, a closed refuge or a washed-out bridge are not on any of these four maps.
• Coverage stops at a border. Plan a route into Italy or Slovenia and the map on this page runs out at or just past the frontier.
• Glaciers move faster than any of these maps are redrawn. Outlines and crevasse texture are a survey of one moment, not a forecast.
• Steepness is implied by contour spacing, not measured. Reading slope angle from four different contour conventions takes practice, which is why a slope-angle layer is worth having on top of all four.

Use all four national maps in Traverse

Traverse is a mountain mapping app for the web and iPhone. All four Alpine editions on this page are in it, drawn on real 3D terrain, with the same layers on top no matter which country's map you are looking at.

• All four maps in 3D: swisstopo, Plan IGN, basemap.at and BKG TopPlusOpen, each draped over real terrain, so a wall of hachures or a cluster of contours reads as the wall or the ridge it actually is.
• Slope angle on top, everywhere: Shade ground over 30 degrees on any of the four editions to see avalanche terrain and the lower-angle way around it, whichever country you are in.
• Snow and glacier layers that are not tied to a border: SnowSight shows recent satellite-observed snow cover, and GlacierIQ adds glacier outlines, ice flow and a crevasse-susceptibility index. They come from satellite and glacier data, not from any national map, so where they have coverage they carry straight across the frontier.
• Routes, GPX and offline: Draw a route or import a GPX, get distance, ascent and a profile, then download the area for use without signal, even across a border where the base map changes.

A Traverse account is free and includes the Traverse, Summer, Winter and Satellite maps with slope angle and aspect. Official national maps, including all four Alpine editions here, are part of Traverse Pro.

Create a free Traverse account · Download Traverse for iPhone

Frequently asked questions

Is there one official topographic map of the whole Alps?

No. The Alps cross eight countries, and each one maps its own share. What gets shown online as a single Alps map is usually a mosaic of several national maps stitched together, or a much coarser overview that skips the detail a national survey provides.

Which countries does Traverse's Alps map cover?

Switzerland, France, Austria and Germany, using each country's own national digital map: swisstopo, Plan IGN, basemap.at and BKG TopPlusOpen. Liechtenstein is included on the Swiss edition. Italy, Slovenia and Monaco are not covered.

Why do contour lines not match at the border?

Because they come from two different national surveys, drawn to two different specifications, sometimes measured against two different sea-level datums. A path or a summit height can shift slightly where one country's data meets another's. It is a real seam, not a rendering error.

Which map should I use for the Tour du Mont Blanc?

The route crosses France, Italy and Switzerland. Traverse covers the French and Swiss stretches with Plan IGN and swisstopo. For the Italian side around Courmayeur you will need Italy's own map, which is not yet part of Traverse.

Which map should I use for the Haute Route?

The classic walkers' route from Chamonix to Zermatt stays inside France and Switzerland, so Plan IGN and swisstopo between them cover it. Some ski variants touch Italy, where you would need the Italian map.

What about Italy, Slovenia and Liechtenstein?

Italy and Slovenia each have their own national mapping agency: IGM maps Italy and GURS maps Slovenia. Neither map is part of Traverse yet. Liechtenstein is mapped by swisstopo along with Switzerland, so it is on the Swiss edition.

What scale are these maps?

All four are digital, multi-scale maps rather than a single fixed-scale sheet. At the closest zooms they carry detail comparable to each country's 1:25 000 hiking sheets.

Can I use these maps offline?

On a phone you need an app that downloads the tiles before you leave signal. Traverse lets you save a region of any of the four editions, with your route and terrain layers, for use without a connection.

Sources

• swisstopo, the Swiss Federal Office of Topography
• IGN, Institut national de l'information géographique et forestière (France)
• basemap.at, Austria's official basemap service
• BEV, Austria's Federal Office of Metrology and Surveying
• BKG TopPlusOpen, Germany's national topographic map
• Alpine Convention, the treaty defining the Alpine perimeter and its eight member states