Getting your questions ready
Getting your questions ready
Beat the crowd
10 questions No timer
60 free Belgium trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
59 free Belgium trivia questions with answers. Belgium is small enough to cross in two hours and dense enough to fill a quiz twice over. These fifty questions cover the whole country: Brussels as capital of the EU, the Dutch, French and German language communities, the 1830 revolution and the Bernadotte-free line of kings, Waterloo, Leopold II and the Congo, and the record 589 days without a government. Then the fun part: waffles, fries, pralines and speculoos, the six Trappist breweries and the world's biggest brewer in Leuven, Manneken Pis and his thousand costumes, the Atomium, Tintin, the Smurfs, Magritte's pipe, Adolphe Sax, Audrey Hepburn and Jean-Claude Van Damme, Eddy Merckx, the Red Devils and Spa-Francorchamps. Easy questions ask which city is the capital and what the national football team is nicknamed; the hard ones want the country's highest point, the priest who proposed the Big Bang and where the word 'smurf' came from. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on Belgium, its cities and its people, and each question carries the sentence that backs it up.
30 of 60 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Belgium sits in a coastal lowland part of Europe known as what?
The Low Countries
Belgium lies in the Low Countries, the low-lying delta region of the Rhine, Meuse and Scheldt that it shares with the Netherlands and Luxembourg, together known as Benelux.
Q 02How many nations share a land border with Belgium?
Four
Four countries border Belgium: the Netherlands to the north, Germany and Luxembourg to the east, and its largest neighbour to the south and west; the North Sea takes the fifth side.
Q 03Which language is spoken by the Flemish Community, roughly 60 percent of Belgians?
Dutch
The Flemish Community speaks Dutch; the French Community makes up roughly 40 percent of Belgians, and a small German-speaking Community of about 75,000 people lives in the east.
Q 04What is the northern region of Belgium, governed from a parliament in Brussels, called?
Flanders
Flanders is the northern region, home to about 6.8 million people; Wallonia is the French-speaking south and the bilingual Brussels-Capital Region lies between them.
Q 05In which year did the Belgian Revolution create an independent Belgium?
1830
The Belgian Revolution began in August 1830 with riots in Brussels after an opera performance, and the new state broke from the United Kingdom of the Netherlands that year.
Q 06Belgium's National Day, 21 July, marks the 1831 installation of which first king?
Leopold I
Leopold I, a prince of Saxe-Coburg and uncle of Britain's Queen Victoria, took the oath as first King of the Belgians on 21 July 1831.
Q 07Which Belgian king held the Congo Free State as his private possession from 1885?
Leopold II
Leopold II ran the Congo Free State as a personal fiefdom from 1885; international outrage at the brutal rubber regime forced Belgium to annex it as a colony in 1908.
Q 08How many days did Belgium's record-setting 2010–11 spell under a caretaker government last?
589
Belgium ran 589 days on a caretaker government, from the cabinet's collapse in April 2010, through the June election, to Elio Di Rupo's swearing-in on 6 December 2011.
Q 09Which nickname did centuries of foreign wars earn Belgium?
The Battlefield of Europe
Belgium earned the nickname 'The Battlefield of Europe' because so many armies fought across its flat terrain, from Ramillies in 1706 to the trenches of Ypres in the First World War.
Q 10What is Belgium's highest point, at 694 metres?
Signal de Botrange
Signal de Botrange, at 694 metres, rises on the High Fens plateau near the German border; a six-metre stone tower built in 1923 lifts visitors to a round 700 metres.
Q 11Which forested upland region covers southeastern Belgium?
The Ardennes
The Ardennes, a forested plateau of hills and river gorges, covers southeastern Belgium and hosted the Battle of the Bulge in the winter of 1944–45.
Q 12Belgium was the first country on continental Europe to do what in the early 19th century?
Industrialise
Belgium was the first continental European country to industrialise, building on coal and iron around Charleroi and on the continent's first mainland railway, the Brussels–Mechelen line of 1835.
Q 13What was Belgium's currency before the euro?
The Belgian franc
Q 21Which battle of 18 June 1815, fought south of Brussels, ended Napoleon's rule?
Waterloo
Waterloo, fought on 18 June 1815 south of Brussels, saw Wellington and Blücher defeat Napoleon; the site then lay in the United Kingdom of the Netherlands, Belgium not yet existing.
Q 22Which Dinant-born instrument maker patented a new single-reed brass instrument in 1846?
Adolphe Sax
Adolphe Sax, born in Dinant in 1814, patented the saxophone in Paris in 1846; French military bands adopted it decades before jazz made it famous.
Q 23Which Belgian cartoonist created The Adventures of Tintin in 1929?
Hergé
Hergé launched Tintin in Le Petit Vingtième, the children's supplement of the Brussels newspaper Le Vingtième Siècle, where the boy reporter debuted on 10 January 1929.
The Belgian franc was the currency from 1832 until euro notes and coins replaced it in 2002; the euro had become the accounting currency in 1999.
Q 14Which Belgian city's port ranks second in Europe, behind Rotterdam?
Antwerp
The Scheldt links the city to the North Sea; it also has one of Europe's largest Jewish communities and a famous diamond trade.
Q 15Which medieval Belgian city's UNESCO-listed centre hosts the Procession of the Holy Blood?
Bruges
Bruges stages the Procession of the Holy Blood every Ascension Day, parading a relic said to hold Christ's blood, brought back from the Crusades; its canal-ringed centre is UNESCO-listed.
Q 16Which 15th-century polyptych, the Adoration of the Mystic Lamb, hangs in St. Bavo's Cathedral?
The Ghent Altarpiece
The Ghent Altarpiece, completed by Jan van Eyck in 1432 after his brother Hubert began it, is famous for the Just Judges panel stolen in 1934 and never recovered.
Q 17Which Brussels landmark, built for Expo 58, is an iron crystal magnified 165 billion times?
The Atomium
The Atomium, built for Expo 58, models a unit cell of an iron crystal; its nine spheres stand 102 metres tall and the name blends 'atom' and 'aluminium'.
Q 18Manneken Pis, the famous Brussels fountain, depicts what?
A small boy urinating
Manneken Pis depicts a small boy urinating into the fountain's basin; the bronze by Jérôme Duquesnoy the Elder dates from 1619 and is only about 60 centimetres tall.
Q 19Roughly how many costumes does Manneken Pis have in his wardrobe?
About 1,000
Manneken Pis owns about 1,000 costumes, the first given by Elector Maximilian Emanuel of Bavaria in 1698; since 2017 the collection has had its own museum, the GardeRobe MannekenPis.
Q 20Which country's forces largely destroyed the Grand-Place in Brussels in a 1695 bombardment?
France
France's army under Marshal Villeroi shelled Brussels in August 1695 on Louis XIV's orders; the Grand-Place was gutted but rebuilt within a few years and is a UNESCO site.
Q 24Which Belgian comics magazine, founded by publisher Dupuis in 1938, gave the Marcinelle school its home?
Spirou
Spirou magazine, launched by Dupuis in Marcinelle near Charleroi in April 1938, became home to Franquin's Gaston Lagaffe and Marsupilami, and its rounded house style was dubbed the Marcinelle school.
Q 25Which Belgian comic artist created the Smurfs in 1958?
Peyo
Peyo, the pen name of Pierre Culliford, introduced the Smurfs in 1958 as side characters in his Johan and Peewit strip.
Q 26The Smurfs' creator said 'schtroumpf' was coined at a meal when he couldn't recall what word?
Salt
The Smurfs' creator, at a meal with fellow cartoonist André Franquin, asked for the salt but the word escaped him and he said 'schtroumpf', which became the little blue creatures' name.
Q 27Which Belgian surrealist painted The Treachery of Images, a pipe captioned 'Ceci n'est pas une pipe'?
René Magritte
René Magritte painted The Treachery of Images in 1929; born in Lessines in 1898, he spent most of his career in Brussels and influenced pop artists such as Andy Warhol.
Q 28Which Belgian priest-physicist first argued receding galaxies mean an expanding universe?
Georges Lemaître
Georges Lemaître, a Catholic priest ordained in 1923, published in 1927 the equations linking galactic redshifts to an expanding universe, two years before Hubble's law, and later proposed the 'primeval atom'.
Q 29Which Belgian chemist gave his name to a plastic he developed in 1907-09?
Leo Baekeland
Leo Baekeland, born in Ghent in 1863, invented Bakelite, the first fully synthetic plastic, in 1907 after earlier making a fortune selling his Velox photographic paper to Kodak.
Q 30Which 16th-century Flemish cartographer's name lives on in a famous map projection?
Gerardus Mercator
Gerardus Mercator, born in Rupelmonde in 1512, published his cylindrical world map in 1569; the Mercator projection keeps compass bearings straight, which made it a navigators' standard.