  Subject of this talk is an overview of results on self-gravitating solitons
of the classical Yang-Mills-Higgs theory. One finds essentially two classes of
solitons, one of them corresponding to the magnetic monopoles the other one to
the sphalerons of flat space. The coupling to the gravitational field leads to
new features absent in flat space. These are the gravitational instability of
these solitons at the Planck scale and the existence of black holes with
`non-abelian hair'' in addition to the regular solutions.
