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60 free Alps trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This Alps trivia quiz covers the mountain range that runs 1,200 km from Nice to Vienna, and it goes well beyond naming the highest peak. The easy questions handle Mont Blanc's height, the highest mountains in Germany and Austria, Ötzi the Iceman and the author of Heidi. From there it moves into the passes Hannibal and Napoleon crossed, the lowest and highest road passes, the Gotthard Base Tunnel and the railway that climbs inside the Eiger. The harder end is for mountaineers, geographers and pub-quiz regulars: who reached the top of Mont Blanc in 1786, how many climbers died on the first Matterhorn descent, which national park saved the ibex, why the word 'alp' does not mean a mountain at all, and which naturalist worked out that the whole range was once buried in ice. Wildlife, wildflowers, cheese, Romantic poets and the alphorn all get their turn. Every answer was checked against encyclopaedia entries on the Alps and the individual peaks, passes, animals and people involved, and the supporting sentence is stored with each question. If you enjoy this one, our Switzerland, Austria and mountains quizzes are natural next stops.
30 of 60 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01The Alps stretch across how many countries, counting the microstates?
8
The arc runs roughly 1,200 km from Nice on the Mediterranean to Vienna at the edge of the Pannonian Basin, and two of the eight are microstates.
Q 02Which microstate holds the smallest share of the Alps, just 0.001% of the range?
Monaco
Austria has the largest share at 28.7%, ahead of Italy and France; Switzerland, the country most associated with the range, holds only 13.2%.
Q 03Ötzi the Iceman was discovered on a glacier at the Austria-Italy border in which year?
1991
Two hikers spotted the body on 19 September 1991 and assumed it was a recently dead mountaineer; it turned out to be Europe's oldest known natural human mummy.
Q 04Ötzi's remains are on permanent display in a museum in which city?
Bolzano
A land survey found the body lay 92.56 metres inside Italian territory, which is why the Iceman ended up in South Tyrol's capital rather than in Austria.
Q 05Ötzi carried an axe whose blade was made almost entirely of which metal?
Copper
The blade is 99.7% pure, and high levels of the same metal plus arsenic in his hair suggest he may have been involved in smelting it.
Q 06What evidence convinced researchers that Ötzi was killed by another person?
An arrowhead in his shoulder
The projectile point sits in his left shoulder alongside other wounds, making the Iceman one of the world's oldest cold cases.
Q 07Hannibal led his army and elephants over the Alps in which year?
218 BC
Historians still argue over which pass he used, because the only sources are Polybius and Livy, born roughly 20 and 160 years after the event.
Q 08Hannibal's crossing of the Alps was part of which conflict?
Second Punic War
Before the mountains, his elephants had to be floated across a river on earth-covered rafts so they would think they were still on land.
Q 09The first Winter Olympics, in 1924, were held in which Alpine resort?
Chamonix
The French town at the foot of Mont Blanc got the games first; St. Moritz followed in 1928 and Garmisch-Partenkirchen in 1936.
Q 10How tall is Mont Blanc, the highest peak in the Alps?
4,810 m
The summit is a thick dome of perennial ice and snow, so its measured height shifts by a few metres from survey to survey.
Q 11The first recorded ascent of Mont Blanc took place in which year?
1786
Two men from the valley reached the top on 8 August, and the climb is traditionally treated as the birth of modern mountaineering.
Q 12Jacques Balmat made the first ascent of Mont Blanc alongside which doctor?
Michel-Gabriel Paccard
Saussure, the Geneva naturalist who had offered a reward for the climb, made the ascent himself the following year.
Q 13The Mont Blanc Tunnel, opened in 1965, links France with which Italian town?
Courmayeur
The 11.6 km road tunnel took eight years to build and remains one of the main routes across the Alps for freight.
Q 21The Eiger, Mönch and Jungfrau are often translated as the Ogre, the Monk and the...?
Virgin
German folklore has the Monk standing between the Ogre and the Maiden to protect her.
Q 22The Jungfrau railway, which climbs to Europe's highest station, opened to tourists in which year?
1912
The 7 km tunnel took 14 years to bore and stops at 3,454 metres, short of the summit its promoter originally planned to reach.
Q 23Which pass did Napoleon cross with 40,000 troops in 1800?
Great St Bernard
The Romans had used the same crossing to reach their north-western provinces, and a hospice for travellers has stood at its summit since 1049.
Q 14What caused the 1999 disaster inside the Mont Blanc Tunnel?
A truck caught fire
The tunnel was closed for three years and reopened with a parallel escape shaft, extra safety bays and a fire station at its midpoint.
Q 15Who led the party that made the first ascent of the Matterhorn in 1865?
Edward Whymper
He had failed seven times, mostly from the Italian side, before succeeding by the Hörnli ridge above Zermatt on 14 July 1865.
Q 16How many of the seven climbers in the 1865 first-ascent party died on the way down the Matterhorn?
4
The rope broke and Croz, Hadow, Hudson and Lord Francis Douglas fell to the glacier; Douglas's body was never found.
Q 17On the Italian side, the Matterhorn is known by what name?
Cervino
The name descends from the Latin Mons Silvanus, 'forest mountain', which was corrupted over the centuries into the French Cervin.
Q 18Which is the largest glacier in the Alps?
Aletsch
About 23 km long and up to 905 metres thick at Konkordiaplatz, it anchors a region that became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2001.
Q 19The notorious north face of the Eiger was first climbed in which year?
1938
A German-Austrian party of four topped out on 24 July, the same year an Alpine Journal editor called the face 'an obsession for the mentally deranged'.
Q 20Heinrich Harrer's classic book about climbing the Eiger's north face is called what?
The White Spider
The title refers to an ice field near the top of the wall; Harrer made the climb without crampons of his own.
Q 24The Gotthard Base Tunnel, the world's longest railway tunnel, runs for roughly how many kilometres?
57 km
It opened in 2016 as the first flat, low-level route through the Alps, and at its deepest point 2,450 metres of rock sit above the track.
Q 25At just 984 metres, which is the lowest of the major Alpine passes?
Semmering
It links Lower Austria with Styria and has carried trade continuously since the 12th century, gaining a railway tunnel in the mid-1800s.
Q 26Which is the highest paved road pass in the Alps?
Col de l'Iseran
The Savoy pass tops out at 2,770 metres, a few metres higher than Italy's Stelvio, whose road was built in the 1820s.
Q 27The northern ramp of the Stelvio Pass is famous for how many numbered hairpin bends?
48
The Giro d'Italia first crossed it in 1953, when Fausto Coppi beat Hugo Koblet, and Top Gear once called it the greatest driving road in the world.
Q 28Which pass carries the E45 motorway between Innsbruck and South Tyrol, a trade route since Roman times?
Brenner
Maria Theresa had a carriage road laid over it in 1777, and the border barrier there was formally abolished in 1995.
Q 29What is the highest mountain in Germany?
Zugspitze
At 2,962 metres it straddles the Austrian border and once had a staffed customs post on the summit itself.
Q 30What is the highest mountain in Austria?
Grossglockner
It rises 3,798 metres above the Pasterze, Austria's longest glacier, and was first climbed in 1800 by a party organised by a prince-bishop.