  In November 2010 the ALICE experiment at CERN has collected the first Pb--Pb
collisions at $\sqrt{s_{NN}}$ = 2.76 TeV produced by the LHC. A first
characterization of the hot and dense state of matter produced in this new
energy domain became available shortly after the run. In this paper we present
the results on charged-particle multiplicity, Bose-Einstein correlations,
elliptic flow and their dependence on the collision centrality. Results from
first measurements of strange and identified particle production and
suppression of high-momentum hadrons with respect to $pp$ collisions are also
reported.
