Rhine Trivia
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53 free Rhine trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
The Rhine rises in the Swiss Alps, forms borders with Liechtenstein, Austria, Germany and France, and reaches the North Sea through the Netherlands after about 1,230 kilometres. This quiz follows it downstream: the Tomasee and the two headstreams that meet at Reichenau, Lake Constance and the Rhine Falls, the knee at Basel, the straightened Upper Rhine, the castle-lined gorge past the Lorelei, the Rhine-Ruhr industrial belt and Europe's biggest inland port, and the delta where the Waal takes two-thirds of the water to Rotterdam. It also covers what happened on its banks: the Roman frontier, Cologne Cathedral, the Nibelung legends and Wagner's Rhinegold, Riesling and the Rheingau, the Rhine crisis and 'Die Wacht am Rhein', the Ludendorff Bridge at Remagen, Montgomery's Operation Plunder, the 1986 Sandoz spill and the Rhine-Main-Danube Canal. Questions run from easy (which sea the Rhine flows into) to expert (which distributary carries a ninth of the flow). Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on the Rhine, its sections, cities, landmarks and history, and each question shows the sentence that supports it. Try our Germany, Danube and rivers of Europe quizzes next.
30 of 53 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01The Rhine empties into which sea?
The North 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.
Q 02The Rhine begins in which Swiss canton?
Graubünden
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.
Q 03In Central and Western Europe, only which river is longer than the Rhine?
Danube
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.
Q 04The name Rhine goes back to Rēnos, a river name in which early Celtic language?
Gaulish
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.
Q 05The Anterior Rhine's Ruinaulta gorge, cut through the debris of a vast prehistoric rockslide, is promoted as the Swiss what?
Grand Canyon
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.
Q 06The Alpine Rhine forms the western border of which tiny country?
Liechtenstein
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.
Q 07The Rhine flows through which large body of water shared by Germany, Switzerland and Austria?
Lake Constance
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.
Q 08The Rhine Falls, among Europe's most powerful waterfalls, lie just downstream of which Swiss town?
Schaffhausen
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.
Q 09Which river, after flowing through Bern, more than doubles the Rhine's flow where the two meet?
The Aare
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.
Q 10At which city does the 'Rhine knee' turn the river from flowing west to flowing north?
Basel
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.
Q 11In Rhine legend, which creatures swarmed an island tower and ate the cruel Archbishop Hatto alive?
Mice
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.
Q 12Which French city on the Upper Rhine is the seat of the European Parliament?
Strasbourg
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.
Q 13Which river flows through Frankfurt shortly before joining the Rhine?
The Main
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.
Q 21Which Rhine tributary gave its name to Germany's coal-and-steel heartland around Essen and Dortmund?
The Ruhr
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.
Q 22Which Dutch branch of the Rhine carries about two-thirds of its water?
The Waal
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.
Q 23The IJssel branch of the Rhine flows north into which body of water?
The IJsselmeer
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.
Q 14Which rock above the Rhine is the legendary seat of a siren who lures boatmen to their deaths?
The Lorelei
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.
Q 15Marksburg, a Middle Rhine castle, was copied for a 1990s theme park in which country?
Japan
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.
Q 16The Deutsches Eck in Koblenz is the promontory where which river joins the Rhine?
The Moselle
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.
Q 17Which statesman who helped redraw Europe after Napoleon was born in Koblenz, on the Rhine?
Metternich
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.
Q 18At which city does the Middle Rhine leave its hills and become the Lower Rhine?
Bonn
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.
Q 19Which Rhine city's Gothic cathedral, begun in 1248, was not completed until 1880?
Cologne
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.
Q 20Which Rhine city hosts Europe's largest inland port?
Duisburg
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.
Q 24Which Dutch painter was born in Leiden, where his father ran a malt mill on the Old Rhine?
Rembrandt
Rembrandt carried the river in his name all his life: the miller's family lived beside it, and van Rijn means 'of the Rhine'.
Q 25The Rhineland zone that Hitler's troops reoccupied in 1936 had been demilitarised under which treaty?
The Treaty of Versailles
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.
Q 26The loss of three legions in which AD 9 battle led Rome to settle on the Rhine as its frontier?
The Teutoburg Forest
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.
Q 27Whose Symphony No. 3, the 'Rhenish', was inspired by the Rhineland?
Robert Schumann
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.
Q 28The Nibelungenlied, written around 1200, is set largely at the Burgundian court in which Rhine city?
Worms
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.
Q 29In Wagner's Das Rheingold, what must the dwarf Alberich renounce before he can forge the Rhinemaidens' gold into a ring?
Love
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.
Q 30Which white grape, the classic variety of Rheingau vineyards, is thought to have originated in the Rhine valley?
Riesling
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.