Getting your questions ready
Getting your questions ready
Beat the crowd
10 questions No timer
50 free Patagonia trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This Patagonia trivia quiz covers the vast, windswept southern end of South America shared by Argentina and Chile, from Magellan's 'giants' of 1520 to the climbers, sheep farmers, dinosaur hunters and outdoor brand that carry its name today. The easier questions handle the landmarks: the two countries, the Andes and the steppe, the Strait of Magellan, Ushuaia at the 'end of the world', the Perito Moreno glacier and the guanaco. The harder end is for people who have driven Ruta 40: the chivalric romance that may have supplied the name, the 153 Welsh settlers who landed from the Mimosa in 1865, the general who led the Conquest of the Desert, the Romanian gold-hunter of Tierra del Fuego, the ranch where Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid hid out, the ice field that is the world's second-largest outside the poles, the disputed 1959 first ascent of Cerro Torre, the stencilled hands of Cueva de las Manos, the Bariloche chocolate tradition, the titanosaur dug up west of Trelew and the piece of giant sloth skin that sent Bruce Chatwin south. There are also questions on the wildlife, the Beagle Channel and the Carretera Austral. Every answer was checked against encyclopaedia entries for the region, its parks, towns, peoples and wildlife before publishing, and the supporting sentence is stored with each question. If you enjoy this one, our Argentina, Chile, Andes and South America geography quizzes are natural next stops.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Patagonia is shared between which two countries?
Argentina and Chile
Roughly 90 percent of the region lies in Argentina and about 10 percent in Chile.
Q 02Patagonia comes from 'patagón', Magellan's 1520 term for natives believed to be what?
Giants
The locals were simply taller than Europeans of the day; Pigafetta claimed they stood 9 to 12 feet.
Q 03Which indigenous people are now thought to be the 'Patagons' Magellan met?
Tehuelche
They hunted game with bolas on the steppe; their numbers collapsed soon after European contact.
Q 04One theory traces the name to a monstrous character in which 1512 chivalric romance?
Primaleón
Bruce Chatwin preferred a Greek root meaning 'a roaring', since Pigafetta said the natives roared like bulls.
Q 05Which two rivers are usually taken as the northern limit of Argentine Patagonia?
The Colorado and Barrancas
South of them lie five Argentine provinces plus the southern tip of Buenos Aires Province.
Q 06Argentine Patagonia rises from the Atlantic in a series of how many abrupt terraces?
13
Each step is about 100 m, and the plateau is covered in shingle almost bare of vegetation.
Q 07Why is the eastern Patagonian steppe so dry compared with the Chilean side?
The Andes create a rain shadow
Islands near Torres del Paine get 4,000 to 7,000 mm of rain a year while the eastern plains get as little as 200 mm.
Q 08Which Patagonian city is described as among the windiest places on Earth, with gusts of 100 km/h?
Río Gallegos
Even Balmaceda, on the Chilean side of the same steppe, is known as the coldest place in Chile.
Q 09Which wild camelid, a close relative of the llama, is the signature mammal of the Patagonian plains?
Guanaco
The steppe is one of its last strongholds; indigenous hunters once pursued it on foot with bolas.
Q 10The Andean condor, seen over Patagonia, has a maximum wingspan of about how much?
3.3 m
It can weigh 15 kg, live more than 70 years and, unusually for a raptor, the female is smaller than the male.
Q 11The Magellanic penguin, named for the explorer who spotted it, can live up to how many years in the wild?
25
It breeds along the coasts of Argentina, Chile and the Falklands; a San Francisco Zoo bird named Captain Eo reached 40.
Q 12The Valdés Peninsula is the world's most important breeding ground for which marine mammal?
Southern right whale
They gather in the sheltered Golfo Nuevo and Golfo San José near Puerto Madryn; elephant seals and orcas share the coast.
Q 13The Cueva de las Manos in Santa Cruz is famous for hundreds of stencilled images of what?
Human hands
The paintings were sprayed through bone pipes in several waves from about 7300 BC; the site is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
Q 21The Welsh-Argentine community, still famous for its tea rooms, is centred on the valley of which river?
Chubut
Gaiman, Dolavon, Trelew and Trevelin are its main towns; the Welsh call the river Camwy.
Q 22The Patagonian town of Trelew is named after which pioneer of the Welsh colony?
Lewis Jones
'Tre' means town in Welsh; he had scouted the area with Captain Love Jones-Parry in 1862.
Q 23Which Argentine general led the 1870s Conquest of the Desert against Patagonia's indigenous peoples?
Julio Argentino Roca
Troops killed more than 1,000 Mapuche and displaced 15,000; historians still argue whether it was civilising mission or genocide.
Q 14What did Magellan call the passage he found in 1520 before Charles V renamed it after him?
All Saints
The 570-km channel is only 2 km wide at its narrowest and is far more sheltered than the Drake Passage.
Q 15Tierra del Fuego, 'Land of Fire', got its name from what?
Fires lit by indigenous inhabitants along the coast
Magellan feared the fire-builders were waiting in the forests to ambush his fleet.
Q 16Ushuaia claims to be the world's southernmost city. What does its Yaghan name mean?
Deep bay
It sits on the Beagle Channel about 1,100 km from the Antarctic Peninsula and is a gateway for Antarctic cruises.
Q 17Chile founded Punta Arenas in 1848 as what?
A penal colony to assert sovereignty over the strait
It later boomed on wool and gold and drew waves of Croatian and Russian immigrants.
Q 18Cape Horn was first rounded in 1616 and named after a city in which country?
Netherlands
Willem Schouten and Jacob Le Maire named it for Hoorn; it marks the northern edge of the Drake Passage.
Q 19Which naturalist rode with gauchos and boated 200 miles up the Santa Cruz River in the 1830s?
Charles Darwin
He was aboard HMS Beagle under Robert FitzRoy, who later gave his name to Patagonia's most photographed peak.
Q 20The Welsh colony in Patagonia began in July 1865 when 153 settlers landed from which ship?
Mimosa
Most came from the South Wales coalfield; the landing place grew into Puerto Madryn.
Q 24Which Romanian adventurer landed in southern Patagonia in 1885 and found gold in Tierra del Fuego?
Julius Popper
The gold rush and sheep boom drove the settlement that displaced the Selk'nam and other native peoples.
Q 25Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid are believed to have died in a 1908 shootout with which country's army?
Bolivia
With Etta Place they had fled the United States to Argentina first; the exact circumstances of their deaths remain unclear.
Q 26Which ice mass, the world's third-largest fresh water reserve, feeds the Perito Moreno Glacier?
The Southern Patagonian Ice Field
The 30-km glacier is one of 48 fed by the field and its 5-km-wide terminus rises about 74 m above Lake Argentino.
Q 27The Perito Moreno Glacier is named after Francisco Moreno, who was what?
An explorer who defended Argentina's border claims
He also donated the land that became Nahuel Huapi, Argentina's oldest national park; 'perito' means expert.
Q 28The southern Andes' ice field is the world's second-largest contiguous ice field outside which areas?
The polar regions
It stretches about 350 km, with 14,200 sq km in Chile and 2,600 in Argentina, and feeds dozens of glaciers on both sides of the border.
Q 29Which Chilean glacier is the largest by area and longest in the Southern Hemisphere outside Antarctica?
Pío XI (Brüggen)
At 1,265 sq km it dwarfs the more famous Perito Moreno, which covers about 258 sq km.
Q 30In Torres del Paine National Park, what does 'Paine' mean in the language of the Aonikenk people?
Blue
The Chilean park, created in 1959, draws about 252,000 visitors a year, more than half of them foreign.