It is believed that the colour glass condensate (CGC) can describe the increase of parton density at very high energies or small values of the Bjorken-x. In this paper, the principal features of the CGC framework are outlined. Special attention is given to the prospects of observing gluon saturation effects at the Large Hadron Collider. In particular, heavy flavour and charmonium production are discussed in terms of physics performance studies of the ALICE forward muon spectrometer.