Belgium Trivia
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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 01Long before the word Benelux, Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg were together known as what?
The Low Countries
The Low Countries. The name means the same as 'Netherlands', lower lands, and the three were last united under one crown from 1815 until Belgium broke away in 1830.
Q 02Belgium's one short stretch of coast faces which sea?
North Sea
The North Sea. One tram line, the Kusttram, follows the Belgian shore for 67 km, from near the French border almost to the Netherlands, so a single ride takes in nearly the whole coast.
Q 03Which language is spoken by the Flemish Community, roughly 60 percent of Belgians?
Dutch
Dutch is the majority language, yet Belgium was long run in French: only the Equality Law of 1898 put it on a par with French as an official language.
Q 04Which region covers the mainly French-speaking southern half of Belgium?
Wallonia
Wallonia was long Belgium's powerhouse, its coal mines and steel mills strung along the Sambre and Meuse valleys, but when the coal ran out in the later 20th century, Flanders overtook it.
Q 05What had a Brussels audience just watched when it joined Belgium's 1830 revolution?
Opera
An opera: theatregoers streamed out of Auber's La Muette de Portici, the tale of a revolt in Naples, to join rioters in the streets, and Belgium declared its independence within weeks.
Q 06Belgium's National Day, 21 July, marks the day in 1831 that which king took his oath?
Leopold I
Leopold I, a prince of Saxe-Coburg and uncle of Queen Victoria, had turned down the crown of Greece the year before the Belgians offered him theirs.
Q 07Which Belgian king held the Congo Free State as his private possession from 1885?
Leopold II
Leopold II ran the Congo Free State as a personal fiefdom from 1885; international outrage at the brutal rubber regime forced Belgium to annex it as a colony in 1908.
Q 08What kept Belgium without a new government for 541 days in 2010–11?
Rival language blocs
Rival language blocs: parties from the two main language communities stayed deadlocked so long that the outgoing cabinet ran the country as caretaker throughout, and Belgium took Cambodia's record for the longest such wait.
Q 09Under which Belgian town's Menin Gate do buglers sound the Last Post every evening for the First World War missing?
Ypres
Ypres has heard it under the Menin Gate every night since the late 1920s, except during the wartime occupation: it resumed on the very evening in 1944 that Polish troops freed the town.
Q 10Belgium's highest point, Signal de Botrange, rises close to the border with which country?
Germany
Germany held the hill until the Treaty of Versailles moved the border, so Botrange replaced nearby Baraque Michel as the summit; in 1923 a six-metre mound was added to lift its 694 metres to a round 700.
Q 11Which forested upland region covers southeastern Belgium?
The Ardennes
The Ardennes were long judged too difficult for a big offensive, which is exactly why the tanks came through them: in 1940 and again in December 1944, in the Battle of the Bulge.
Q 12Belgium was the first country on continental Europe to do what in the early 19th century?
Industrialise
Industrialise: the know-how came from Britain with William Cockerill, an English mechanic who began building wool-spinning machines at Verviers in 1799, and whose son John founded the Seraing ironworks.
Q 13What was Belgium's currency before the euro?
The Belgian franc
Q 21Which 1815 battlefield south of Brussels is crowned by the Lion's Mound, built where a prince was reportedly wounded?
Waterloo
Waterloo was reshaped by one of its victors: the king of the Netherlands, father of the wounded prince, had the earth for the mound stripped from the very ridge Wellington had defended.
Q 22Which Dinant-born instrument maker patented a new single-reed instrument made of brass in 1846?
Adolphe Sax
Adolphe Sax, born in Dinant in 1814, patented the saxophone in 1846; French military bands adopted it decades before jazz made it famous.
Q 23Which Belgian cartoonist created The Adventures of Tintin in 1929?
Hergé
Hergé was the pen name of Georges Remi, his initials reversed to R.G. and spoken in French; his boy reporter first ran in the children's supplement of a Brussels newspaper.
The Belgian franc replaced the guilder in 1832, as the newly independent kingdom dropped its old ruler's money for a coin equal in value to the French one.
Q 14Which Belgian port's river, the Scheldt, was closed to sea trade for two centuries?
Antwerp
Antwerp was a great trading city until the breakaway provinces that held the river's mouth shut the Scheldt after 1585; its merchants and money moved to Amsterdam, and the river reopened only in the 1790s.
Q 15Which medieval Belgian city's UNESCO-listed centre hosts the Procession of the Holy Blood?
Bruges
Bruges parades a phial said to hold Christ's blood each Ascension Day; tradition says a crusader carried it home in the 12th century, though it may really have reached the city after the sack of Constantinople in 1204.
Q 16Which painter completed the Ghent Altarpiece, the Adoration of the Mystic Lamb, in 1432?
Jan van Eyck
Jan van Eyck's masterpiece is reckoned the most stolen artwork in history: soldiers carried panels off to the Louvre, the Nazis later seized it, and one panel stolen in 1934, the Just Judges, has never been returned.
Q 17Which Brussels landmark was built as the centrepiece of the 1958 World's Fair?
The Atomium
The Atomium models an iron crystal magnified 165 billion times; engineer André Waterkeyn designed its nine linked steel spheres to show off Belgian metalworking skill in the atomic age.
Q 18The Manneken Pis on its Brussels street corner is a 1965 copy; where is the 1619 original kept?
The city museum
The city museum, housed in the Maison du Roi on the Grand-Place, took the little bronze in for safekeeping after it had been stolen or damaged again and again over the centuries.
Q 19Manneken Pis gained a squatting sister in Brussels in 1987 and later a third peeing statue of which animal?
Dog
A dog: Zinneke Pis, a bronze mutt lifting its leg against a street post, completed the family; when a car hit it in 2015, its sculptor mended it and put it back.
Q 20Which country's forces largely destroyed the Grand-Place in Brussels in a 1695 bombardment?
France
France's guns, sent by Louis XIV, wrecked the square in three days in 1695, yet the Town Hall tower they had used as their aiming mark stayed standing, and the rest was swiftly rebuilt.
Q 24Which Belgian comics magazine, launched by Dupuis in 1938, is named after its hero, a red-uniformed hotel bellhop?
Spirou
Spirou kept his red bellhop uniform long after the strip dropped his hotel job; the weekly's home town also named the 'Marcinelle school', the lively, rounded style of its artists.
Q 25Which fictional detective is a retired Belgian police officer who came to England as a First World War refugee?
Hercule Poirot
Hercule Poirot was inspired by the Belgian refugees living in Agatha Christie's home town of Torquay in 1914; when she finally killed him off in 1975, The New York Times ran his obituary on its front page.
Q 26Which Belgian cartoon characters got their name when their creator blanked on the word 'salt' at dinner?
Smurfs
The Smurfs: by Peyo's account, he asked André Franquin to pass 'the schtroumpf', his friend answered in kind, and the nonsense word later named the little blue extras he added to a medieval strip in 1958.
Q 27Which Belgian surrealist painted The Treachery of Images, a pipe captioned 'Ceci n'est pas une pipe'?
René Magritte
René Magritte painted it like an advertisement to make one point: the image of a pipe is not a pipe, so the caption tells the truth; the canvas now hangs in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
Q 28Which Belgian priest-physicist first argued receding galaxies mean an expanding universe?
Georges Lemaître
Georges Lemaître published the idea in 1927, two years before Edwin Hubble's measurements made it famous, and in 2018 astronomers voted to rename Hubble's law the Hubble–Lemaître law.
Q 29Which Belgian-born chemist gave his name to a plastic he developed in 1907?
Leo Baekeland
Leo Baekeland, born in Ghent in 1863, invented Bakelite, the first fully synthetic plastic, in 1907 after earlier making a fortune selling his Velox photographic paper to Kodak.
Q 30Which 16th-century Flemish cartographer's name lives on in a famous map projection?
Gerardus Mercator
Gerardus Mercator, born in Rupelmonde in 1512, published his cylindrical world map in 1569; the Mercator projection keeps compass bearings straight, which made it a navigators' standard.