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
The Netherlands and Luxembourg share the label; together the three are the Benelux.
Q 02How many nations share a land border with Belgium?
Four
The Netherlands, Germany, Luxembourg and France; the North Sea takes the fifth side.
Q 03Which language is spoken by the Flemish Community, roughly 60 percent of Belgians?
Dutch
About 40 percent speak French and around one percent German, and the split runs through everything from politics to universities.
Q 04What is the northern, Dutch-speaking region of Belgium called?
Flanders
Wallonia is the French-speaking south; the bilingual Brussels-Capital Region sits between them.
Q 05In which year did the Belgian Revolution create an independent Belgium?
1830
The new state broke away from the United Kingdom of the Netherlands set up at the Congress of Vienna.
Q 06Belgium's National Day, 21 July, marks the 1831 installation of which first king?
Leopold I
He was a German prince, uncle of Britain's Queen Victoria.
Q 07Which Belgian king held the Congo Free State as his private possession from 1885?
Leopold II
International outrage at the brutality of the rubber and ivory regime forced the Belgian state to take the colony over in 1908.
Q 08Belgium set a world record by going how many days without a government after the 2010 election?
589
The country's six governments and language politics make coalition-building notoriously slow.
Q 09Which nickname did centuries of foreign wars earn Belgium?
The Battlefield of Europe
Both world wars, and Waterloo before them, reinforced the label.
Q 10What is Belgium's highest point, at 694 metres?
Signal de Botrange
It sits on the High Fens plateau in the Ardennes, near the German border.
Q 11Which forested upland region covers southeastern Belgium?
The Ardennes
Its hills and gorges 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
Coal, iron and steel around Liège and Charleroi made it one of the three most industrialised nations from 1830 to 1910.
Q 13What was Belgium's currency before the euro?
The Belgian franc
It ran from 1832 until 2002.
Q 21Which battle of 18 June 1815, fought south of Brussels, ended Napoleon's rule?
Waterloo
At the time the site lay in the United Kingdom of the Netherlands; Belgium did not yet exist.
Q 22Which Belgian invented the saxophone, patenting it in 1846?
Adolphe Sax
Born in Dinant, he survived falling down three flights of stairs and drinking vitriol as a child.
Q 23Which Belgian cartoonist created The Adventures of Tintin in 1929?
Hergé
His pen name is the French pronunciation of his reversed initials, R.G., for Georges Remi.
Hergé's pen name comes from reversing the initials of his real name. What was it?
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
Its silted-up outlet, the Zwin, is why trade shifted to Antwerp in the 15th century.
Q 16Which 15th-century polyptych, the Adoration of the Mystic Lamb, hangs in St. Bavo's Cathedral?
The Ghent Altarpiece
Also called the Adoration of the Mystic Lamb, it is by the van Eyck brothers and has been stolen, in part, more than once.
Q 17Which Brussels landmark, built for Expo 58, is an iron crystal magnified 165 billion times?
The Atomium
Its nine steel spheres stand 102 metres tall; the name blends 'atom' and 'aluminium'.
Q 18Manneken Pis, the famous Brussels fountain, depicts what?
A small boy urinating
The bronze is only 55.5 cm tall and has been stolen several times, once being smashed into eleven pieces.
Q 19Roughly how many costumes does Manneken Pis have in his wardrobe?
About 1,000
They have had their own museum, GardeRobe MannekenPis, since 2017.
Q 20Which country's forces largely destroyed the Grand-Place in Brussels in a 1695 bombardment?
France
Only the Town Hall's tower, which the gunners were aiming at, survived; the square was rebuilt within four years and is now a UNESCO site.
Georges Remi
R.G. pronounced in French gives 'air-zhay'.
Q 25Which Belgian comic artist created the Smurfs in 1958?
Peyo
His real name was Pierre Culliford; the Smurfs first appeared as side characters in his Johan and Peewit series.
Q 26According to Peyo, 'schtroumpf' was coined at a meal when he couldn't recall what word?
Salt
He asked fellow cartoonist André Franquin to pass the 'schtroumpf', and a language was born.
Q 27Which Belgian surrealist painted The Treachery of Images, a pipe captioned 'Ceci n'est pas une pipe'?
René Magritte
Born in Lessines in 1898, he became a major influence on pop art, a link he himself dismissed.
Q 28Which Belgian priest-physicist first argued receding galaxies mean an expanding universe?
Georges Lemaître
He was ordained in 1923 and taught at Louvain until 1964, with a cardinal's blessing for his science.
Q 29Which Belgian chemist gave his name to a plastic he developed in 1907-09?
Leo Baekeland
Bakelite was the first fully synthetic plastic.
Q 30Which 16th-century Flemish cartographer's name lives on in a famous map projection?
Gerardus Mercator
His contemporary Vesalius, the anatomist, was also Belgian-born.