53 Fun Facts About Rhine

The Rhine empties into which sea?

The North Sea is reached near Rotterdam, where the river's natural mouths clogged with sand so badly that the Dutch dug a new ship canal to the coast, opened in 1872.

The Rhine begins in which Swiss canton?

Graubünden holds Lake Toma, where tradition says the river begins, and since 2010 a red lighthouse on the nearby Oberalp Pass, copied from one at its Dutch mouth, has marked the spot.

In Central and Western Europe, only which river is longer than the Rhine?

The Danube is more than twice as long; the Rhine's own length was misprinted for decades as 1,320 km, apparently through two swapped digits, until a 2010 check put it near 1,230 km.

The name Rhine goes back to Rēnos, a river name in which early Celtic language?

Gaulish Rēnos meant roughly 'that which flows'; Greek and Roman writers borrowed it, and the Greek spelling Rhēnos is why English still writes Rhine with an h.

The Anterior Rhine's Ruinaulta gorge, cut through the debris of a vast prehistoric rockslide, is promoted as the Swiss what?

Grand Canyon is the tourist-board nickname for a gorge born when the Flims rockslide dammed the valley and the young river sawed its way back down through the rubble.

The Alpine Rhine forms the western border of which tiny country?

Liechtenstein faces Switzerland across the Alpine Rhine, which burst its banks near Schaan in 1927, flooded three villages and scoured out the country's only natural lake.

The Rhine flows through which large body of water shared by Germany, Switzerland and Austria?

Lake Constance has no agreed frontier across its main basin: the three countries around it have never settled where their borders meet in the open water.

The Rhine Falls, among Europe's most powerful waterfalls, lie just downstream of which Swiss town?

Schaffhausen sits just above the falls, which formed in the last ice age when the river was pushed onto a new course over a ledge of hard limestone.

Which river, after flowing through Bern, more than doubles the Rhine's flow where the two meet?

The Aare is the bigger river where they meet, bringing about 560 cubic metres a second to the Rhine's 440, so by volume the Rhine is really its tributary.

At which city does the 'Rhine knee' turn the river from flowing west to flowing north?

Basel, at the bend, is also where landlocked Switzerland meets the sea: its river docks are the country's only cargo port, with barges running down to Rotterdam.

In Rhine legend, which creatures swarmed an island tower and ate the cruel Archbishop Hatto alive?

Mice, the tale goes, hunted Hatto down after he locked starving peasants in a barn and burned it during a famine; the tower is still called the Mouse Tower.

Which French city on the Upper Rhine is the seat of the European Parliament?

Strasbourg is the Parliament's official seat, so MEPs must gather there for twelve plenary sessions a year, even though extra sittings are held in Brussels.

Which river flows through Frankfurt shortly before joining the Rhine?

The Main has been turned into a staircase of locks as far up as Bamberg, where a canal opened in 1992 carries barges on over the watershed into the rivers of south-east Europe.

Which rock above the Rhine is the legendary seat of a siren who lures boatmen to their deaths?

The Lorelei siren is younger than she sounds: the poet Clemens Brentano invented her in a ballad around 1801, and Heinrich Heine's 1824 poem made her famous.

Marksburg, a Middle Rhine castle, was copied for a 1990s theme park in which country?

Japan got its copy on Miyako Island after the castle's owners, the German Castles Association, turned down a plan to dismantle the real one and ship it there.

The Deutsches Eck in Koblenz is the promontory where which river joins the Rhine?

The Moselle joins at the Deutsches Eck, 'German Corner', a name that honours not the nation but the Teutonic Knights, who were given land at the confluence in 1216.

Which statesman who helped redraw Europe after Napoleon was born in Koblenz, on the Rhine?

Metternich was a Rhinelander: his family fled the French revolutionary armies in 1794 and lost its estates there, and he went on to run Austria's foreign policy for almost forty years.

At which city does the Middle Rhine leave its hills and become the Lower Rhine?

Bonn marks the divide because the last hills, the Siebengebirge, end here, and from this point the river runs across open lowland all the way to the coast.

Which Rhine city's Gothic cathedral, begun in 1248, was not completed until 1880?

Cologne's builders gave up in the 16th century, and for centuries a wooden crane sat on the stump of the south tower until work finally restarted in 1842.

Which Rhine city hosts Europe's largest inland port?

Duisburg's docks are also the end of the line for freight trains from Chongqing: since 2011 a rail route across Asia has linked the Chinese city to the port.

Which Rhine tributary gave its name to Germany's coal-and-steel heartland around Essen and Dortmund?

The Ruhr valley's coal mattered so much that French and Belgian troops occupied the region in 1923 when Germany fell behind on its war reparations.

Which Dutch branch of the Rhine carries about two-thirds of its water?

The Waal's width made history in 1944, when US paratroopers paddled across it in canvas boats to seize the far end of the great road bridge at Nijmegen.

The IJssel branch of the Rhine flows north into which body of water?

The IJssel runs north past Deventer, Zwolle and Kampen into the IJsselmeer, the freshwater lake that replaced the tidal Zuiderzee after the Afsluitdijk dam closed it off.

Which Dutch painter was born in Leiden, where his father ran a malt mill on the Old Rhine?

Rembrandt carried the river in his name all his life: the miller's family lived beside it, and van Rijn means 'of the Rhine'.

The Rhineland zone that Hitler's troops reoccupied in 1936 had been demilitarised under which treaty?

The Treaty of Versailles barred German troops from the Rhineland, yet when Hitler marched them back in on 7 March 1936 neither France nor Britain acted.

The loss of three legions in which AD 9 battle led Rome to settle on the Rhine as its frontier?

The Teutoburg Forest ambush was sprung by Arminius, a Germanic chieftain who held Roman citizenship and had been trained as an officer in Rome's own army.

Whose Symphony No. 3, the 'Rhenish', was inspired by the Rhineland?

Robert Schumann wrote the 'Rhenish' soon after moving to Düsseldorf, yet in 1854, his mind failing, he threw himself into the river there and had to be rescued.

The Nibelungenlied, written around 1200, is set largely at the Burgundian court in which Rhine city?

The Burgundian court of the Nibelungenlied sits at Worms, where Siegfried comes to win Kriemhild, sister of King Gunther; Hagen later sinks the Nibelung hoard in the Rhine.

In Wagner's Das Rheingold, what must the dwarf Alberich renounce before he can forge the Rhinemaidens' gold into a ring?

Love is the price: the Rhinemaidens let slip that only someone who forswears it can forge the ring, and the dwarf they have just mocked curses love and grabs the gold.

Which white grape, the classic variety of Rheingau vineyards, is thought to have originated in the Rhine valley?

Riesling's sweet late-harvest wines began, the story goes, in 1775, when a courier bringing permission to pick reached a Rheingau estate late and the half-rotten grapes made a surprisingly good wine.

Legend says which emperor had the first Rheingau vineyards planted near today's Schloss Johannisberg?

Charlemagne, the story goes, watched from his palace at Ingelheim across the river as the snow melted first on the Johannisberg slope, and had vines planted there.

In which 1942 film do café patrons drown out German officers singing 'Die Wacht am Rhein' with 'La Marseillaise'?

Casablanca made the song the sound of the occupier, though it began as an 1840 poem written when France laid claim to the Rhine as its eastern border.

After Napoleon's fall in 1815, most of the Rhineland was handed to which kingdom, which made it a province?

Prussia did well out of it: under its rule the Rhineland grew into Germany's industrial heartland, the country's most important manufacturing district.

US troops captured the Ludendorff Bridge across the Rhine on 7 March 1945 at which town?

Remagen's bridge was wired to blow, but the charge only lifted the span and let it settle back in place, a failure for which Hitler had four German officers shot.

What happened to the Ludendorff Bridge ten days after its capture?

It collapsed with US engineers aboard, killing more than two dozen, on 17 March 1945; the failed demolition, shelling and ten days of heavy traffic had weakened it.

Which field marshal commanded Operation Plunder, the Allied Rhine crossing of 23 March 1945?

Bernard Montgomery's set-piece crossing was upstaged by his American rival Patton, who slipped a division over the river far upstream the night before.

The 1986 Sandoz chemical fire at Schweizerhalle killed much of the Rhine's population of which animal?

Eels were killed in huge numbers after firefighting water washed pesticides and mercury into the river and turned it red; the outcry led to the Rhine Action Programme to clean it up.

A 1992 canal links the Rhine to the Danube and so to which sea?

The Black Sea link fulfilled an old dream: Bavaria's King Ludwig I had a first canal dug in the 1830s and 1840s, but it lost out to the railways and was abandoned.

Which Dutch programme, begun after the 1953 flood, dammed most of the Rhine and Meuse estuaries?

The Delta Works were meant to seal the Eastern Scheldt with a solid dam, but protests by fishermen and environmentalists won a barrier of gates that normally stand open to the tide.

Which 12th-century abbess, composer and visionary was known as the 'Sibyl of the Rhine'?

Hildegard of Bingen founded her own convent on the Rupertsberg, above the river near Bingen, and from there wrote music, medicine and theology.

Mainz, on the left bank of the Rhine, is the capital of which German state?

Rhineland-Palatinate has only the left bank of its capital: in 1945 the occupation-zone line along the river handed three districts of Mainz to Wiesbaden, which still runs them.

Which Romantic poet's lines on 'the castled crag of Drachenfels' made the Rhine hill a tourist attraction?

Lord Byron's verses in Childe Harold's Pilgrimage made the ruin so popular that Germany's oldest working rack railway has hauled visitors up the hill since 1883.

The Rhine's upper reaches run highest not in winter but in early summer, fed mainly by what?

Melting Alpine snow and glacier ice swell the upper river in summer, while further downstream the great floods come in winter and spring instead.

Why was the Alpine Rhine's mouth moved into a new canal in 1900?

To stop floods in its delta, the Fussach cut sent the river straight into the lake through Austrian land, and the abandoned old riverbed has since become a nature reserve.

Which Rhine city hosted the 1414–18 church council that burned Jan Hus?

Konstanz saw the council depose two rival popes and elect Martin V; today the river's kilometre markers are counted from zero at the city's old bridge.

The road up the Posterior Rhine valley crosses the Alps into a Swiss valley speaking which language?

Italian begins at the San Bernardino Pass, yet the Posterior Rhine's highest villages speak German, the tongue of Walser settlers who moved in during the 13th century.

The Upper Rhine Plain is a rift valley lying between Germany's Black Forest and which French mountain range?

The Vosges and the Black Forest are the two flanks of the rift, left standing on either side when the block between them dropped to form the plain.

The Rhine bridge in which Dutch city was the 'bridge too far' of Operation Market Garden in 1944?

Arnhem's bridge over the Lower Rhine was the last in the chain: British paratroopers seized one end, but the ground column meant to relieve them never reached it.

The Rhine's shipping commission, often called the world's oldest international organisation, was created at which congress?

The Congress of Vienna set up the commission to keep the river open to every nation's ships; it first met in Mainz in 1816 and is still at work today.

Legend says a baby survived the 1421 St. Elizabeth's flood in a cradle kept afloat by which animal?

A cat, the tale goes, leapt from side to side to keep the cradle level until it drifted up to a dike, the story told to explain the name Kinderdijk, 'children's dike'.

Closing off the Zuiderzee with the Afsluitdijk in 1932 let the Dutch drain land for which new province?

Flevoland. Polders drained behind the dam, mostly in the 1950s and 1960s, were merged in 1986 into the twelfth Dutch province, built almost entirely on former seabed.

Which legionary base on the Rhine is now a French city?

Argentoratum. The Eighth Legion Augusta guarded the river crossing there for some three centuries, and in 357 the future emperor Julian beat the Alamanni nearby.

Which general first bridged the Rhine, in 55 BC?

Julius Caesar had a timber bridge thrown across the Rhine in ten days in 55 BC, made a brief show of force in Germania, then tore it down; he repeated the feat in 53 BC.