FRANCE and Italy are at loggerheads over French plans to limit tourism on what is said to be an overcrowded “roof of Europe”.

Jean-Marc Peillex, the Mayor of Saint-Gervais, has called for a strict limit to the number of climbers on Mont Blanc, which he said had reached an unacceptable level of 30,000 a year.

He said that the French would issue permits and impose a fee “to safeguard both the environment and the climbers themselves”.

Last month an avalanche on Mont Blanc killed two Frenchmen and injured four Swiss climbers.

M Peillex said that Europe’s highest peak was in danger. “There are human traffic jams at the mountain refuges. Something must be done to preserve the mountain’s purity.”

He said he had recently surveyed the 4,810m (15,780ft) mountain by helicopter and had landed in the middle of a glacier that had gone yellow because of the quantity of climbers’ urine.

The mayor, who has called a public meeting on the “Mont Blanc crisis” at Saint-Gervais this month, said that he would also force climbers to bring down their refuse.

He said the mountain was littered with rubbish, and one clean-up operation had stumbled across a washing machine.

“We are getting climbers from Eastern Europe now as well as Western Europe,” M Peillex said. “Imagine what will happen if we start getting Alpine tourists from Asia and India — how many climbers will we have to look after then? 100,000 a year?” M Peillex said that rescue teams were routinely getting 800 calls a day, compared with about 15 a day ten years ago.

But Romano Blua, the Mayor of Courmayeur, on the Italian side of Mont Blanc, said that complaints of overcrowding were “nonsense”.

“I simply do not believe there are 30,000 people climbing the mountain a year,” he said. “The real problem is the reverse — fewer and fewer people are coming to the Alps each year.”

Signor Blua said that this year two mountain refuges on the Italian side — at Gonnella and Monzino — had been closed for restoration. “We did not receive a single complaint, which shows climbers are not exactly queueing up.”

Guido Azzalea, the head of the Alpine Guides’ Association in the Val d’Aosta, said that the idea of permits was “a joke — but then that’s the French for you”.

Mountains were “a symbol of liberty. You can’t take bookings for them like a hotel. If people want to spend the night on a glacier or climb mountain paths made over the centuries, that is up to them”.

Philippe Imbert, of the French association Mountain Wilderness, said the Alps were at risk not just from climbers but also from property development, tourist helicopter flights and, above all, “glacier shrinkage” because of global warming.

“Mountains from Mont Blanc to the Matterhorn are melting and crumbling,” La Stampa said.

This week authorities at Cervinia, below the Matterhorn, said they would have to blow up an outcrop that, because of melting ice, was threatening to collapse on to the Carrel refuge.

It is named after Jean-Antoine Carrel — an Italian despite his French-sounding name — who beat a British team led by the climber and artist Edward Whymper in a race to the peak in 1865.

The British suffered a setback when their rope broke. Four of the party were killed, although Whymper survived to describe the tragedy in his 1871 book Scrambles Amongst the Alps in the Years 1860-69.

HIGH DEMAND

According to the French Office de Haute Montagne, between 300 and 400 climbers attempt the summit daily in summer

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