Danube River Trivia
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49 free Danube River trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
The Danube touches more countries than any river on Earth and flows through more capital cities than any other, yet it starts as two modest streams in Germany's Black Forest and, on dry summer days, disappears completely into limestone sinkholes before it has gone very far. This quiz follows it all the way to the Black Sea: Donaueschingen and the Breg, the Danube Sink and the Rhine that is slowly stealing its water, Regensburg, Passau, Vienna, Bratislava, Budapest and Belgrade, the Iron Gates gorge, and the delta that is the best preserved in Europe. It also covers the river's history as the frontier of Rome, Trajan's bridge into Dacia, the Ottoman-Habsburg wars fought along its banks, the 1856 commission that opened it to free navigation, the Rhine-Main-Danube Canal that joined it to the North Sea, and the wrecks and mammoth bones exposed by the record drought of 2026. Music and literature get a turn with Strauss's Blue Danube, Ivanovici's Waves of the Danube, Jules Verne and Claudio Magris. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on the Danube and its landmarks, and each question shows the sentence that supports it. Try our Vienna, Budapest, Germany and Hungary quizzes next.
30 of 49 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01The Danube is Europe's second-longest river after which?
Volga
The Volga. It runs about 3,500 km without ever leaving Russia, while the Danube's 2,850 km take it through or along ten countries.
Q 02Into which sea does the Danube empty?
Black Sea
The Black Sea. The silt the river carries has built a delta at its mouth, and new land is still forming where its arms reach the sea.
Q 03Which country has less than a kilometre of the Danube's bank?
Moldova
Moldova. Its bank at Giurgiulești is only a few hundred metres long, yet the country has built its only port open to seagoing ships on it.
Q 04Which four national capitals stand on the Danube?
Vienna, Bratislava, Budapest and Belgrade
Vienna, Bratislava, Budapest and Belgrade. The third only became a single city in 1873, when Buda and Óbuda on the west bank merged with Pest on the east.
Q 05The Danube takes its name at the meeting of the Brigach and Breg in which German town?
Donaueschingen
Donaueschingen. The town presents a spring beside its palace as the place where the river begins, but hydrologists count the spring of the larger Breg near Furtwangen instead.
Q 06The Danube rises in which German mountain range?
Black Forest
The Black Forest. Its headstreams, the Breg and the Brigach, rise on the range's eastern slopes, so a river born in Germany's south-west corner ends up on the far side of Europe.
Q 07The ancient Greeks knew the Danube by which name?
Istros
Istros. A Greek colony founded near the river's mouth carried the same name, and the Romans kept it as Ister alongside their own Danubius.
Q 08The 'Shoes on the Danube Bank' memorial to Jews shot at the river in 1944–45 stands in which city?
Budapest
Budapest. Sixty pairs of iron shoes line the embankment because Arrow Cross militiamen made their victims take off their footwear, valuable in wartime, before shooting them into the river.
Q 09At Passau, which Alpine tributary joins the Danube carrying more water than the Danube itself?
Inn
The Inn. Where they meet it is the bigger river, yet its catchment is far smaller than the one the Danube has gathered by then, and the smaller stream keeps the name.
Q 10The highest point in the Danube's drainage basin, Piz Bernina, rises in which country the river never reaches?
Switzerland
Switzerland. Meltwater from the 4,049-metre peak runs down the Engadin valley and on through Austria to meet the Danube in Bavaria.
Q 11The Danube's middle section, downstream of the Devín Gate near Bratislava, crosses which lowland?
Pannonian Basin
The Pannonian Basin. The Romans held only the part west and south of the river as their province of Pannonia, with the Danube as the frontier, yet the whole lowland now carries the name.
Q 12Which UNESCO-listed stretch of the Danube valley between Melk and Krems is known for its terraced vineyards?
Wachau
The Wachau. UNESCO listed it in 2000 because its abbeys, castle ruins and vine terraces show how the valley has been lived in and farmed since prehistoric times.
Q 13The Mesolithic village of Lepenski Vir, known for its stone sculptures, lies on the Danube in which gorge?
Iron Gates
Q 21Geologists predict the Danube's upper course will one day be lost entirely to which river?
Rhine
The Rhine. Its bed lies far lower, so Danube water already leaks to it through the limestone, and before the last ice age the Alpine rivers that now feed it flowed east instead.
Q 22The Aachtopf spring near the upper Danube holds what German record?
Highest-flow wellspring
Highest-flow wellspring. It pours out about 8,500 litres a second on average, enough to launch a small river, the Radolfzeller Aach, straight from the rock.
Q 23Which Persian king crossed the Danube in the late 6th century BCE to attack the Scythians?
Darius the Great
The Iron Gates. The settlement came to light in the 1960s only because a hydroelectric dam was about to flood the bank, and archaeologists were racing to explore it first.
Q 14The Danube Delta lies mostly in which country?
Romania
Romania. A few thousand years ago none of it existed: the site was an open bay, which the river's silt has since filled to make the best-preserved delta in Europe.
Q 15Which plant forms vast beds and even floating islands in the Danube Delta's marshes?
Reeds
Reeds. Their matted roots form floating islands known locally as plaur, and the cut stems have been used to make paper and textile fibres.
Q 16The Danube's Chilia arm forms part of which country's southern border?
Ukraine
Ukraine. The Chilia carries the largest share of the river's flow, yet it was the far smaller Sulina arm that engineers straightened and dredged to take seagoing ships.
Q 17The canal that has linked the Danube to the North Sea since 1992 runs from Kelheim to Bamberg on which river?
Main
The Main. Charlemagne had a ditch dug between the two river systems as early as 793, and the modern canal lifts barges over the watershed through 16 locks.
Q 18The canal finished in 1984 lets ships leave the Danube at Cernavodă and reach the sea at which port?
Constanța
Constanța. Work began in 1949 and was abandoned in 1953; the canal finally opened in 1984 and cuts some 400 km off the trip between the river and the sea.
Q 19Ocean-going ships can sail up the Danube only as far as which city?
Brăila
Brăila. Though it lies about 170 km from the river's mouth, the channel below it takes small and medium ocean-going ships, which turns an inland town into a seaport.
Q 20What happens to the upper Danube at the Donauversickerung on many summer days?
It sinks completely underground
It sinks completely underground. The water drains away through porous limestone, leaving the bed below it dry on well over a hundred days a year.
Darius the Great. The Scythians would not stand and fight: they devastated the land as they fell back, and for lack of supplies he had to abandon the campaign.
Q 24Which Roman emperor bridged the Danube near Drobeta in order to conquer Dacia?
Trajan
Trajan. His architect Apollodorus of Damascus set timber arches on masonry piers so that the legions could march across for the second war against the Dacians.
Q 25From the 15th to the 19th century the lower Danube marked the northern border of which power?
Ottomans
The Ottomans. North of the river they let Wallachia keep its own princes in return for tribute, instead of annexing it as they had the lands to the south.
Q 26Which 1526 battle near the Danube cost Hungary's King Louis II his army and his life?
Mohács
Mohács. The young king died in the flight from the field, and the defeat opened the way for his kingdom to be divided between the victors and the Habsburgs.
Q 27Which animal, hunted to extinction along the Bavarian Danube in the 19th century, was brought back in the 1960s and has thrived?
Beaver
The beaver. From the animals conservationists released, Bavaria's stock has grown into the thousands, and their dams now slow floodwater and create wetlands that shelter other wildlife.
Q 28Six threatened species of which fish are native to the Danube basin?
Sturgeon
Sturgeon. Two big dams built across the river in the 1970s and 1980s had no fish passes, cutting the migrants off from their spawning grounds upstream.
Q 29Which large salmon species is endemic to the Danube basin?
Huchen
The huchen. Nicknamed the Danube salmon, it spends its whole life in fresh water, and dam-building on its home rivers has left it endangered.
Q 30The 1856 treaty opening the Danube to all nations' ships ended which war?
Crimean War
The Crimean War. The peace treaty opened the river to ships of every nation and created a European commission to keep it open, the forerunner of today's Danube Commission.