Bolivia Trivia
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58 free Bolivia trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Bolivia is the country with two capitals, a navy despite having no coast, the highest big city on Earth and a salt flat so large and flat that satellites use it to calibrate their altimeters. Its silver mountain financed the Spanish Empire, Che Guevara died in one of its villages, Butch Cassidy probably did too, and its first indigenous president grew coca for a living before taking office. This quiz spans geography (Titicaca, Uyuni, Sajama, the Yungas death road), history (Tiwanaku, Potosí, the wars that cost Bolivia its coast and its Chaco, the 1952 revolution, Morales and after), symbols and culture (the tricolour and the Wiphala, the Diablada, Alasitas and Ekeko, cholita wrestling), food (salteñas, chuño) and sport (the 6-1 over Argentina at altitude). Questions run from easy to expert. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia and other reference pages before publishing.
30 of 58 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which of Bolivia's two capitals is the constitutional capital and seat of the judiciary?
Sucre
Sucre kept the title and the supreme court as a compromise after an 1898 bid to move the capital to La Paz set off a civil war; the president and congress went to La Paz.
Q 02La Paz holds which distinction among the world's capital cities?
Highest administrative capital on Earth
Highest administrative capital on Earth, yet La Paz was built low for its setting: the centre lies in a deep canyon below the surrounding plateau, which shelters it from the cold highland winds.
Q 03Which is the largest city in Bolivia, located in the eastern tropical lowlands?
Santa Cruz
Santa Cruz was a small outpost town for most of its history, then grew so fast on farming and natural gas that it overtook La Paz around the turn of the 21st century.
Q 04In 2001 La Paz began sending young people into traffic dressed as which animal?
Zebras
Zebras were chosen because a striped crosswalk is a 'paso de cebra' in Spanish; the costumed helpers are at-risk young people hired by the city, and other Bolivian cities copied the idea.
Q 05Salar de Uyuni in southwestern Bolivia is the world's largest what?
Salt flat
Salt flat is what was left when a vast prehistoric lake dried up; after rain a thin film of water turns the whole plain into a giant mirror of the sky.
Q 06Salar de Uyuni is so level and so vast that scientists use it for what purpose?
Calibrating satellite altimeters
Calibrating satellite altimeters: once this plain of more than 10,000 square kilometres, one of the most level places on Earth, had been mapped by GPS, satellites passing overhead could check their height readings against it.
Q 07Titicaca, shared by Bolivia and Peru, is often described as the world's highest what?
Navigable lake
Navigable lake: its first steamer was built in England in 1862, then carried up the Andes in pieces on the backs of mules and put together on the shore.
Q 08In Inca belief, which deity first rose from a sacred rock on an island in Lake Titicaca?
The sun god
The sun god's rock stands on Isla del Sol, the Island of the Sun, and Inca rulers, who claimed to be his descendants, crossed the lake on pilgrimage to the temple built there.
Q 09Cerro Rico, the mountain above Potosí, was for centuries the world's greatest source of which metal?
Silver
Silver struck here in 1545 made Potosí the largest city in the New World within three decades; so many miners died inside that locals still call it 'the mountain that eats men'.
Q 10Bolivia's famously rich Potosí lent its name to San Luis Potosí, a city in which country?
Mexico
Mexico's San Luis Potosí took the name once rich mines opened in the hills beside it, to compare them with the Bolivian original; in Spanish, 'un potosí' still means a fortune.
Q 11Bolivia lost its entire coastline to Chile in which 19th-century conflict?
The War of the Pacific
The War of the Pacific began when Bolivia broke a promise not to raise taxes on Chilean nitrate companies; Chile landed troops at the port of Antofagasta in February 1879 and soon held the whole coast.
Q 12Despite being landlocked, Bolivia maintains what branch of its armed forces?
A navy
A navy of some 5,000 sailors in 2018, founded in the 1960s with four patrol boats from the United States, chases smugglers and drug traffickers along the Amazon's tributaries.
Q 13One of Bolivia's official flags carries a large yellow star standing for what?
Q 21The Wiphala, a national symbol of Bolivia since 2009, has what design?
A chequered square of seven colours
A chequered square of seven colours, 49 small squares in all, it was written into the 2009 constitution as a state symbol, though historians still argue over whether the design is centuries old or a 1970s creation.
Q 22Bolivia's tricolour flag has which three horizontal bands, top to bottom?
Red, yellow, green
Red, yellow, green stand for the blood of the country's soldiers, its mineral wealth and its fertile land; until 1851 the same three colours flew in a different order, with yellow on top.
Q 23Bolivia's Yungas Road, once the world's most dangerous, was cut in the 1930s largely by whom?
The nation's right to access the sea
The nation's right to access the sea: the star stands for the coastal province lost to Chile, and every 23 March Bolivia marks the Day of the Sea with parades calling for its return.
Q 14Bolivia lost the 1932-35 Chaco War over land thought to contain what?
Oil
Oil was what both sides expected to find under the Chaco; Bolivia, with three times its enemy's population, lost most of the region yet kept its proven oilfields in the Andean foothills, which the victors never reached.
Q 15Which revolutionary was captured by CIA-assisted Bolivian troops and shot the next day in October 1967?
Che Guevara
Che Guevara's hands were cut off before his secret burial so that fingerprints could prove who he was; his remains lay hidden in Bolivia for thirty years before they were found and flown to Cuba.
Q 16Which two American outlaws are believed to have died fighting Bolivian soldiers at San Vicente?
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid were reportedly trapped after robbing a mine payroll; the story goes that with Sundance mortally wounded, Cassidy turned his gun on himself, though other tales bring him home alive.
Q 17Evo Morales, who led Bolivia from 2006 to 2019, was the country's first what?
Indigenous president
Indigenous president, as he is widely regarded: he herded his family's animals as a boy in a highland village and won the 2005 election with about 54% of the vote, the first outright majority in a Bolivian election in decades.
Q 18Before politics, Evo Morales was a trade-union leader of farmers growing which crop in the Chapare?
Coca
Coca is chewed across the Andes as well as refined into cocaine; under Morales, Bolivia quit the UN drug treaty in 2012 and rejoined a year later with an exemption for the traditional chewing of the leaf.
Q 19Bolivia's 2009 constitution replaced 'Republic' in the country's official name with which term?
Plurinational State
Plurinational State was chosen to reflect a country made up of many indigenous nations; the same charter also left Bolivia, until then officially Catholic, with no official religion.
Q 20After Spanish, which indigenous language has the most speakers in Bolivia?
Quechua
Quechua was the language of the Inca Empire, which ruled western Bolivia for under a century before the Spanish came, yet it still has more Bolivian speakers than Aymara.
Paraguayan prisoners of war
Paraguayan prisoners of war from the Chaco War hacked it out of the mountainside, and many died doing so; in 1995 a development bank counted 200 to 300 deaths a year and called it the world's most dangerous road.
Q 24Why did traffic on Bolivia's Yungas 'Death Road' keep to the left?
So drivers could see the cliff edge
So drivers could see the cliff edge: keeping left put the driver's seat right above the drop, on a dirt track only about three metres wide with falls of up to 600 metres.
Q 25Which pre-Columbian civilisation near Lake Titicaca collapsed around AD 1000?
Tiwanaku
Tiwanaku turned marshy lakeshore into raised fields to feed its capital, until a run of droughts around the turn of the millennium helped bring the whole system down.
Q 26Nevado Sajama, Bolivia's highest peak at 6,542 m, is what kind of mountain?
An extinct volcano
An extinct volcano with a flat, snow-covered summit: in 2001 a team of villagers and a team of mountain guides climbed it and played a football match on top, to show that sport is possible at such heights.
Q 27Which snowcapped peak, more than 6,400 m high, looms over La Paz as the backdrop to the city?
Illimani
Illimani was hit near its summit by an Eastern Air Lines jet on New Year's Day 1985; the wreck lay so high that no bodies or flight-recorder parts were found for three decades, feeding conspiracy theories.
Q 28As of 2019, La Paz's Mi Teleférico held which world record?
Longest aerial cable-car system
Longest aerial cable-car system: La Paz sits in a canyon some 400 m below its neighbour El Alto, and the winding roads between them were so clogged that from 2014 commuters were lifted over them instead.
Q 29Bolivia altered the clock on its congress building in 2014 to honour the southern hemisphere by doing what?
Run anticlockwise
Run anticlockwise: the numerals were reversed too, since a sundial's shadow turns that way south of the equator, and the foreign minister who unveiled this 'clock of the south' already wore a wristwatch to match.
Q 30At La Paz's Witches' Market, the dried foetuses of which animal are sold as offerings to Mother Earth?
Llama
Llama foetuses, called sullus, are burned in offerings to Pachamama or buried under the foundations of new buildings to ask her protection for the house and the workers building it.