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50 free Danube River trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
The Danube touches more countries than any river on Earth and flows through more capital cities than any other, yet it starts as two modest streams in Germany's Black Forest and, on dry summer days, disappears completely into limestone sinkholes before it has gone very far. This quiz follows it all the way to the Black Sea: Donaueschingen and the Breg, the Danube Sink and the Rhine that is slowly stealing its water, Regensburg, Passau, Vienna, Bratislava, Budapest and Belgrade, the Iron Gates gorge, and the delta that is the best preserved in Europe. It also covers the river's history as the frontier of Rome, Trajan's bridge into Dacia, the Ottoman-Habsburg wars fought along its banks, the 1856 commission that opened it to free navigation, the Rhine-Main-Danube Canal that joined it to the North Sea, and the wrecks and mammoth bones exposed by the record drought of 2026. Music and literature get a turn with Strauss's Blue Danube, Ivanovici's Waves of the Danube, Jules Verne and Claudio Magris. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on the Danube and its landmarks, and each question shows the sentence that supports it. Try our Vienna, Budapest, Germany and Hungary quizzes next.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01The Danube is Europe's second-longest river after which?
Volga
It runs about 2,850 km from the Black Forest to the Black Sea.
Q 02Into which sea does the Danube empty?
Black Sea
It arrives via a delta shared by Romania and Ukraine.
Q 03The Danube passes through or borders how many countries?
Ten
Its drainage basin extends into nine more, or ten if Kosovo is counted.
Q 04Which four national capitals stand on the Danube?
Vienna, Bratislava, Budapest and Belgrade
No other river in the world flows through as many capitals.
Q 05The Danube takes its name at the meeting of the Brigach and Breg in which German town?
Donaueschingen
The confluence lies in the town's palace park; the Breg itself rises at Furtwangen and is the longest headstream.
Q 06The Danube rises in which German mountain range?
Black Forest
The Rhine also begins nearby, and the two rivers compete for southern Germany's water.
Q 07The ancient Greeks knew the Danube by which name?
Istros
The Latin forms were Danubius, Danuvius, Ister or Hister; the Thraco-Phrygian name Matoas meant 'the bringer of luck'.
Q 08Which is the most populous city on the Danube?
Budapest
Its agglomeration holds about 3.3 million people; the Hungarian capital's Danube banks are a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
Q 09Which Romanian city is the largest port on the Danube?
Galați
Brăila marks the upper limit of the maritime sector reachable by ocean ships.
Q 10How many countries does the Danube's drainage basin extend into beyond the ten it touches?
Nine
They range from Bosnia and Herzegovina at 4.6% of the basin down to slivers of Italy, Poland, North Macedonia and Albania.
Q 11The highest point in the Danube's drainage basin is which Alpine summit?
Piz Bernina
It stands 4,049 m on the Italy-Switzerland border; the basin as a whole is home to 83 million people.
Q 12The Danube's middle section, downstream of the Devín Gate near Bratislava, crosses which lowland?
Pannonian Basin
Also known as the Carpathian Basin, it takes in the Hungarian plains of Kisalföld and Alföld.
Q 13The Iron Gate I dam recorded a record peak discharge on 13 April 2006 of roughly how much?
15,400 m³/s
The gorge holds two hydroelectric stations, and downstream of the second the river runs free for more than 860 km to the sea.
Q 21What happens to the upper Danube at the Donauversickerung on many summer days?
It sinks completely underground
The water flows through porous limestone and resurfaces 12 km south at the Aachtopf spring, feeding the Rhine instead.
Q 22Geologists predict the Danube's upper course will one day be lost entirely to which river?
Rhine
The process is called stream capture; before the last ice age the Alpine waters that now feed the Rhine ran east down the Urdonau.
Q 23The Danube's Aachtopf spring holds what German record?
Highest-flow wellspring
It pours out an average of 8,500 litres per second north of Lake Constance.
Q 14The oldest planned settlement in Europe, Lepenski Vir, sits on the Danube in which gorge?
Iron Gates
Archaeologists named a whole Mesolithic culture, dated 13,000 to 5,000 years ago, after the gorge.
Q 15The Danube Delta, the largest river delta in the European Union, lies mostly in which country?
Romania
Its northern part is in Ukraine's Odesa Oblast; it has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1991.
Q 16The Danube Delta's wetlands host migratory birds of more than how many species?
300
They include the endangered pygmy cormorant, and the marshes support 45 freshwater fish species.
Q 17The Danube splits into how many main distributaries in its delta?
Three
The delta stretches from Pătlăgeanca to Sulina, where the river meets the Black Sea.
Q 18The 1992 canal joining the Danube to the North Sea does so via which German river?
Rhine
The Rhine-Main-Danube Canal created a 3,500 km waterway from Rotterdam to Sulina and joins the Danube at Kelheim.
Q 19The Danube-Black Sea Canal, finished in 1984, shortens the trip to the sea by roughly how far?
400 km
It runs 64 km between Cernavodă and Constanța in Romania.
Q 20Ocean-going ships can sail up the Danube as far as which Romanian city?
Brăila
River ships continue to Kelheim in Bavaria and small craft to Ulm.
Q 24Which Persian king crossed the Danube in the late 6th century BCE to attack the Scythians?
Darius the Great
Alexander the Great later reached the river from Macedonia in 336 BCE.
Q 25Roman forces crossed the Danube into Dacia after building a bridge in 101 CE near which garrison town?
Drobeta
The victory over Decebalus created the province of Dacia, which Aurelian abandoned in 271.
Q 26For centuries the Danube marked the northern border of which power?
Ottomans
Ottoman-Hungarian and Ottoman-Habsburg wars were fought along it from 1366 to 1791.
Q 27Which 1526 clash on the Danube was among the most important Ottoman victories along the river?
Mohács
The Ottomans besieged Vienna three years later, in 1529.
Q 28Which animal was hunted to extinction along the Bavarian Danube in the 19th century?
Beaver
The Beluga sturgeon population collapsed in the same era after 2,400 years of exploitation for meat and caviar.
Q 29How many species of sturgeon are native to the Danube basin?
Six
All are threatened, and the European sea sturgeon has vanished from the river entirely; the Iron Gates dams built in 1974 and 1984 had no fish passes.
Q 30Which large salmon species is endemic to the Danube basin?
Huchen
It has since been introduced to other rivers by humans.