Copenhagen Trivia
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48 free Copenhagen trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Sep 2026.
Copenhagen started as a merchants' harbour guarded by a bishop's fort and grew into the capital of a union that ran the whole Nordic world. This quiz covers that history: Absalon's 1167 fortress, Eric of Pomerania's move, Christian IV's building spree, the 1711 plague and 1728 fire, Nelson's blind eye in 1801, the rockets of 1807, the Golden Age, the 1943 scuttling and the Finger Plan. The sights get their share: Tivoli's charter and its 1915 rollercoaster, the Little Mermaid's Carlsberg patron and her beheadings, Andersen's Nyhavn, the Round Tower ramp Peter the Great rode up, Christiansborg's three branches of government, Amalienborg, Rosenborg's crown jewels, the dragon spire, Christiania's barracks and Strøget's car ban. Then the Øresund Bridge and its tunnel, the driverless metro, Kastrup, Carlsberg's yeast, Noma, smørrebrød, FCK and Brøndby, Distortion and Arne Jacobsen's hotel. Easy questions ask which island the city sits on and who lived at Nyhavn; hard ones want the fire's toll on the medieval town and the yeast that carries the brewery's name. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on the city and its landmarks, and each question carries the sentence that supports it. Try our Denmark and Stockholm quizzes next.
30 of 48 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Copenhagen sits mainly on which Danish island?
Zealand
Zealand holds most of the city; the rest spills onto Amager, where a king settled Dutch farmers in 1521 to grow vegetables for the royal court.
Q 02Copenhagen's Danish name København originally meant what?
Merchants' harbour
Merchants' harbour, Old Norse Kaupmannahǫfn: the town grew up as a trading post during the great Øresund herring fishery of the 11th century.
Q 03Which chemical element is named after Copenhagen's Latin name, honouring the city where it was discovered?
Hafnium
Hafnium, from Hafnia, was found at Niels Bohr's institute by Coster and de Hevesy, who searched zirconium ores to test the theory that element 72 was no rare earth.
Q 04Which bishop built a fortress on Slotsholmen in 1167, traditionally Copenhagen's founding?
Absalon
Absalon built it, Saxo says, to fight piracy, but the Hanseatic League later captured the city and tore the castle down; its ruins survive beneath the palace on the islet.
Q 05Copenhagen became Denmark's capital around 1416 when which king moved his seat to Copenhagen Castle?
Eric of Pomerania
Eric of Pomerania also introduced the Sound Dues, a toll on ships through the Øresund that lasted over 400 years, yet he was deposed in all three union kingdoms.
Q 06Which city has the only Scandinavian university older than Copenhagen's?
Uppsala
Uppsala University opened in 1477, two years ahead; Copenhagen's own school was re-founded in 1537 after the Reformation to train priests for the new Lutheran church.
Q 07Which builder-king, reigning 1588-1648, gave Copenhagen its Renaissance summer palace and stock exchange?
Christian IV
Christian IV's building spree ended in hard times: his last war cost Denmark land and control of the Baltic, and he lost the sight of one eye in a sea battle.
Q 08Copenhagen's Round Tower, with its spiral ramp, was built as what?
An observatory
An observatory: after Tycho Brahe lost royal favour and left Denmark, the king built it to succeed Brahe's island observatory, Stjerneborg.
Q 09Which ruler rode a horse up the Round Tower's spiral ramp in 1716?
Peter the Great
The tower is part of the Trinitatis complex with a church and the university library.
Q 10Why does so little survive of medieval Copenhagen?
Two great fires
Two great fires, in 1728 and 1795, swept the old town; the first alone burned more than 1,400 houses and wiped out the university library.
Q 11Which admiral led the main British attack at the Battle of Copenhagen in 1801?
Horatio Nelson
Horatio Nelson then negotiated with the heir to the throne, and Denmark suspended its membership of the League of Armed Neutrality.
Q 12The British bombardment of Copenhagen in September 1807 was notable for the deployment of what?
Congreve rockets
Congreve rockets helped set the city ablaze; after days of shelling Copenhagen surrendered and handed its fleet over to the British.
Q 13Copenhagen's 1947 Finger Plan directs the city's growth outward along what?
Commuter rail lines
Commuter rail lines form five fingers reaching out from the centre's palm, while the green wedges between them are kept free of building for farming and leisure.
Q 21The royal family moved into Amalienborg's four Rococo mansions after which event?
The Christiansborg fire of 1794
The Christiansborg fire of 1794 left the royal family homeless, so the king and crown prince each took a mansion, and a colonnade was built across the street to let them reach each other quickly.
Q 22Rosenborg Castle, built in 1606 as a royal summer residence, now houses what?
The Danish crown jewels
The Danish crown jewels are still worn: an 18th-century queen willed her jewellery to the crown rather than to an heir, so every reigning queen since has had them to wear.
Q 23Børsen, Copenhagen's old stock exchange, was famous for a spire, lost to fire in 2024, shaped like what?
Q 14Copenhagen's Tivoli Gardens, opened in 1843, helped inspire which famous theme park?
Disneyland
Disneyland: Walt Disney visited Tivoli while planning his California park, which opened in 1955, and was struck by how clean and orderly the Copenhagen garden was.
Q 15Tivoli's Rutschebanen, built in 1914 and still running, is one of the world's oldest what?
Rollercoaster
Rollercoaster: the wooden coaster still runs with a brakeman on board, who brakes on the descents so the train doesn't pick up too much speed.
Q 16The Little Mermaid statue was commissioned in 1909 by the son of which brewery's founder?
Carlsberg
Carlsberg's heir fell for a ballet of the story, but the ballerina refused to pose nude, so the sculptor's wife posed for the body.
Q 17In 2010 the Little Mermaid statue made its first official trip away from Copenhagen, to which city?
Shanghai
Shanghai hosted Expo 2010, where the statue sat in Denmark's pavilion, while a video work by the dissident artist Ai Weiwei filled her empty rock back home.
Q 18Which author lived in three different houses on Nyhavn and is buried in Assistens Cemetery?
Hans Christian Andersen
Hans Christian Andersen had his first fairy tales published while lodging at Nyhavn 20, and wrote The Tinderbox during his years by the canal.
Q 19Nyhavn, the canal dug in the 1670s up to Kongens Nytorv square, was built mainly for what?
Sea trade
Sea trade: trading houses along its quays unloaded goods straight from the vessels, and the waterfront later grew notorious for sailors' taverns.
Q 20Christiansborg Palace claims to be the only building housing what?
All three branches of a nation's government
All three branches of a nation's government share it, and parliament first moved in after Denmark's 1849 constitution introduced constitutional monarchy.
Four dragons' intertwined tails
Four dragons' intertwined tails crowned the exchange for nearly 400 years until the spire fell in the April 2024 fire, as people rushed in to carry artworks out of the burning building.
Q 24Freetown Christiania was established in September 1971 when squatters occupied what?
A former military barracks
A former military barracks stood empty after the army left, so Christianshavn neighbours broke in to make a playground; soon after, squatters moved in and declared a free town.
Q 25Which Copenhagen street, closed to cars in 1962, became one of Europe's longest pedestrian shopping streets?
Strøget
Strøget is a nickname, not an address: the car-free route is really a chain of differently named streets and squares running from City Hall Square to Kongens Nytorv.
Q 26Which Danish architect's studies of street life from the 1960s shaped Copenhagen's shift toward pedestrians and cyclists?
Jan Gehl
Jan Gehl spent decades counting how people actually use streets, and New York later hired him to help turn Broadway at Times Square from a traffic artery into space for people on foot.
Q 27The Øresund Bridge, opened in 2000, links Copenhagen with which Swedish city?
Malmö
Malmö: the link's tunnel section was cast on shore in 20 giant pieces, towed out and sunk into a trench on the seabed, and the whole crossing still opened ahead of schedule.
Q 28Why does the Øresund crossing dive into a tunnel for its final stretch to Amager?
To keep flight paths clear
To keep flight paths clear: a high bridge beside Copenhagen Airport would have stood in the way of planes and big ships, so the link goes under, from an island built out of the seabed dug up for the tunnel.
Q 29The Copenhagen Metro, opened in 2002, is notable for being what?
Fully driverless
Fully driverless doesn't mean unstaffed: a computer at the control centre drives the trains, while stewards ride along to look after safety and help passengers.
Q 30Which airline has its main hub at Copenhagen's Kastrup airport, the Nordic countries' busiest as of 2024?
SAS
SAS was born in 1946 when the national airlines of Denmark, Norway and Sweden teamed up to fly long-haul routes together, and the three merged fully five years later.