Wales Trivia
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
7correct to beat the crowd
55 free Wales trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
This Wales trivia quiz covers the country from every angle. The geography questions ask about Snowdon and its rack railway, the three national parks, Anglesey, the wettest spot in the UK, the four UNESCO World Heritage Sites and the 58-letter village name on the Menai Strait. The history strand runs from Hywel Dda's law code and Gruffudd ap Llywelyn's brief united kingdom through Edward I's conquest, Owain Glyndwr's revolt, the Tudor Acts of Union, coal and Cardiff's docks, Aberfan, and devolution to the Senedd. Then comes the culture: why the leek and the daffodil, the red dragon of Vortigern's prophecy, Saint David's dove and his last words, the chairing of the bard at the Eisteddfod, male voice choirs and the triple harp, the Mabinogion, Dylan Thomas, laverbread and cawl, S4C, and the Welsh-speaking colony in Patagonia. Sport gets its due too, from the Six Nations to Euro 2016 and the five Welsh clubs in the English football pyramid. Difficulty runs from easy to expert and is shown on every question. Every answer was checked against a reference page and each question carries its citation. For the neighbours, try our Scotland, Ireland and England quizzes.
30 of 55 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which singer from Pontypridd had 1960s hits with 'It's Not Unusual' and 'Delilah'?
Tom Jones
Tom Jones, then unknown, recorded 'It's Not Unusual' only as a demo for Sandie Shaw, who had been offered the song; when she heard it, she said he should sing it himself, and it became his first hit.
Q 02What does the Welsh word 'araf', painted on roads across Wales, tell drivers to do?
Slow down
Slow down: 'araf' is painted beside 'slow' because road signs in Wales went bilingual after Welsh Language Society campaigners defaced English-only signs; the singer Dafydd Iwan was jailed over it in 1970.
Q 03Which Welsh border town, known for its second-hand bookshops, hosts a major literary festival every May and June?
Hay-on-Wye
Hay-on-Wye had its bookshops before its festival: Richard Booth opened the first in 1962, and on 1 April 1977 he declared the town an independent kingdom with himself as king, as a publicity stunt.
Q 04Which Cardiff-born forward retired in 2023 as the record goalscorer for the Wales men's football team?
Gareth Bale
Gareth Bale began his professional career as a left-back at Southampton, yet finished with 41 goals for Wales, having passed Ian Rush's record of 28 with a hat-trick against China in 2018.
Q 05The children's author Roald Dahl was born in Cardiff in 1916 to parents from which country?
Norway
Norway: Dahl's parents named him after the polar explorer Roald Amundsen and spoke Norwegian at home, and the children were baptised at the Norwegian Church in Cardiff.
Q 06Which two plants are worn as national emblems on Saint David's Day?
The leek and the daffodil
The leek and the daffodil are linked in Welsh, where one name for the daffodil is cenhinen Bedr, 'Peter's leek'; one legend has Welsh soldiers wearing leeks on their helmets in a battle against the Saxons.
Q 07Which prime minister popularised the daffodil as a Welsh emblem in the early 20th century?
David Lloyd George
David Lloyd George, the only prime minister whose first language was Welsh, took to wearing a daffodil on the patron saint's day and wore one at the 1911 investiture of the Prince of Wales.
Q 08What is the title of the de facto Welsh national anthem, sung before rugby and football internationals?
Hen Wlad Fy Nhadau
Hen Wlad Fy Nhadau, 'Land of My Fathers', was written in Pontypridd in 1856; before a 1905 rugby match the Wales team is said to have answered New Zealand's haka by singing it, and the crowd joined in.
Q 09What is the name of the devolved Welsh Parliament?
The Senedd
The Senedd opened in 1999 as the National Assembly for Wales after voters backed devolution in 1997 by only 6,721 votes, having rejected it four to one in 1979; it took its present name in 2020.
Q 10Most of Wales's 3.1 million people live in which part of the country?
The south
The south: the nineteenth-century boom of the coalfield and its ports caused a rapid growth in population there, and Cardiff, Swansea, Newport and the nearby valleys are the main centres today.
Q 11Welsh's closest living relatives are Cornish and which language of north-western France?
Breton
Breton: migrants from south-western Britain carried their speech to Brittany in the fifth and sixth centuries; at the 2021 census about 538,000 people in Wales, 17.8%, said they could speak Welsh.
Q 12Which Welsh upland range shares its name with the earliest period of the Palaeozoic era?
The Cambrian Mountains
The Cambrian Mountains and the Cambrian period both take their name from Cambria, Latin for Wales; the later Ordovician and Silurian periods are named after the Ordovices and Silures tribes.
Q 13Which peninsula west of Swansea became Britain's first Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty in 1956?
Gower
Q 21Which English king completed the conquest of Wales in 1283?
Edward I
Edward I finished the conquest after Llywelyn ap Gruffudd was killed near Builth in December 1282 and his brother Dafydd was executed the next year, then ringed north Wales with stone castles to hold it.
Q 22Which Welsh leader was proclaimed Prince of Wales on 16 September 1400, starting a long revolt?
Owain Glyndŵr
Owain Glyndŵr came to control most of Wales and summoned his own parliament; his strongholds had fallen by 1409, yet he fought on as late as 1412 and then vanishes from the record.
Q 23Which castle was the 1284 birthplace of the first English Prince of Wales?
Caernarfon
Gower holds a famous mistake: the 'Red Lady of Paviland', a skeleton stained with red ochre and found in a cave there in 1823, was in fact a young man buried tens of thousands of years ago.
Q 14What is the largest island off the Welsh mainland?
Anglesey
Anglesey, the Romans' Mona, was a stronghold of the druids; while the governor Suetonius Paulinus was away attacking it around AD 60, Boudica rose in revolt behind him in the south-east.
Q 15Which knife-edged ridge in Snowdonia, a famous scramble, is among the wettest places in the United Kingdom?
Crib Goch
Crib Goch was carved by glaciers into an edge so narrow and exposed that it has killed even experienced mountaineers, and the national park authority calls it 'not a mountain for the inexperienced'.
Q 16Which bird of prey, once down to a few pairs in Wales, was voted its favourite bird?
The red kite
The red kite, a common bird in medieval Britain, was persecuted until only a handful of pairs survived, all of them in Wales; it has since recovered and been named 'Bird of the Century'.
Q 17The gwyniad, a rare whitefish, is native only to which lake, the largest natural one in Wales?
Llyn Tegid (Bala)
Llyn Tegid (Bala Lake) is the gwyniad's only native home, and the fish is at risk there, partly because the ruffe, a species introduced to the lake, is thought to eat its eggs and fry.
Q 18Wales's 2021 World Heritage listing honours a north-western landscape shaped by quarrying what?
Slate
Slate: Penrhyn was the largest slate quarry in the world when a bitter three-year dispute began there in 1900, and many local families put signs in their windows reading 'There is no traitor in this house'.
Q 19Which 10th-century king is traditionally credited with codifying Welsh law at an assembly at Whitland?
Hywel Dda
Hywel Dda, 'Hywel the Good', gave his name to laws under which a killing was usually settled by compensation paid to the victim's family rather than by execution.
Q 20Which future king of England led the 1063 campaign that brought down Gruffudd ap Llywelyn, the only king of all Wales?
Harold Godwinson
Harold Godwinson's attack by land and sea drove Gruffudd into Snowdonia, where he was killed and his head sent to Harold, who went on to marry Gruffudd's widow, Ealdgyth, at about the time he became king.
Caernarfon Castle was only a year into building when the king's son was born there in April 1284; a famous legend has the king promising the Welsh a prince who spoke no English, then producing the baby.
Q 24Which monarch's Laws in Wales Acts of 1535 and 1542 annexed Wales to England?
Henry VIII
Henry VIII's Acts of 1535 and 1542 extended English law and county administration to Wales, gave it members of Parliament and made English the sole language of its courts.
Q 25In the 1966 Aberfan disaster, a colliery spoil tip slid onto what?
A junior school
A junior school: lessons had just begun at Pantglas Junior School when the tip engulfed it; the disaster killed 116 children and 28 adults, and the tribunal blamed the National Coal Board.
Q 26Which former miner from Tredegar launched the National Health Service in 1948 as Minister of Health?
Aneurin Bevan
Aneurin Bevan took his model from home: members of the Tredegar Medical Aid Society paid a regular contribution and got free care in return, an idea he extended to the whole of Britain.
Q 27Which north Wales town became the country's seventh city in 2022, in the Platinum Jubilee honours?
Wrexham
Wrexham won city status at its fourth attempt, after failed bids in 2000, 2002 and 2012, joining Cardiff, Swansea, Newport, Bangor, St Asaph and St Davids.
Q 28Which Welsh town became home to the Royal Mint ahead of Britain's change to decimal coins?
Llantrisant
Llantrisant took over from the Mint's old home beside the Tower of London, and minting in the capital, which went back centuries, ended for good in 1975.
Q 29In 2008 Wales became the first nation in the world to be awarded what status?
Fairtrade
Wales was declared the world's first Fair Trade Nation in June 2008 after meeting targets for Fairtrade goods in shops, schools and councils; Scotland followed in 2013.
Q 30Which river rises on Plynlimon and flows through Shrewsbury and Worcester to the Bristol Channel?
Severn
The Severn, Britain's longest river, rises close to the Wye on the slopes of Plynlimon, yet the two take separate routes and meet again only at Chepstow, where the Wye joins the Severn estuary.