Geneva Trivia
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58 free Geneva trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
This Geneva trivia quiz covers Switzerland's second city from every angle: the Rhône leaving Lake Geneva, the Jet d'Eau, Mont Salève and the Pierres du Niton, plus the international city of the Palace of Nations, the Red Cross, the Geneva Conventions and CERN, where the World Wide Web was born. It also digs into the city's history — Caesar's Genava, John Calvin's Protestant Rome, the burning of Servetus, the 1602 Escalade and Mère Royaume's soup cauldron, the assassination of Empress Sisi on the quayside and the ghost-story summer that produced Frankenstein — along with watchmaking, commodity trading, Servette FC and Genève-Servette HC. Questions run from easy to expert with the difficulty shown on each one. Every answer has been checked against a primary reference and each question carries its citation.
30 of 58 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which river flows out of Lake Geneva at the city of Geneva?
Rhône
The Rhône. It pours into the lake's far end cloudy with glacial silt, and the lake settles the load out, so the river leaves Geneva clear until the muddy Arve joins it just below the city.
Q 02Which language is official in both the city and canton of Geneva?
French
French. It remains the everyday language even though a large share of residents are foreigners, drawn by the city's international agencies and banks.
Q 03Which is the only Swiss city with more residents than Geneva?
Zurich
Zurich. The city of Geneva covers only about 16 square kilometres, so most people in its urban area live outside the city limits, in suburbs that spread across the border.
Q 04A 1985 summit in Geneva brought which two Cold War leaders face to face for the first time?
Reagan and Gorbachev
Reagan and Gorbachev. They talked alone, with only interpreters, in a lakeside pool house, and their joint statement declared that a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.
Q 05Which international body did Geneva host after World War I?
The League of Nations
The League of Nations. Its assembly first met in Geneva in November 1920, but the United States never joined, even though President Woodrow Wilson had been the driving force behind it.
Q 06Geneva joined the Swiss Confederation in 1815, the same year as which famous battle?
Waterloo
Waterloo. Geneva signed its union a month before the battle, but it had no land border with Switzerland, so its neighbours had to cede a strip of villages to join the new canton to the rest.
Q 07Which Roman general had the bridge at Geneva torn down in 58 BC to stop the Helvetii migrating west?
Julius Caesar
Julius Caesar. He then had his troops wall off the river bank from the lake to the Jura mountains, and the Helvetii, shut out, had to take a narrow pass through the mountains instead.
Q 08Which international body has kept its world headquarters in Geneva since it was founded in 1948?
The World Health Organization
The World Health Organization. Its founding date, 7 April, is still marked each year as World Health Day, and its vaccination campaign wiped out smallpox by 1980.
Q 09The Geneva Bible of 1560 was the work of English Protestants who had fled which monarch?
Mary I
Mary I. The exiles' Bible sailed to America on the Mayflower, and its margin notes struck King James as seditious; he went on to commission the version that bears his name.
Q 10Which reformer persuaded Calvin to stay in Geneva in 1536?
William Farel
William Farel. Calvin meant to stay one night and pleaded that he wanted a quiet scholar's life; Farel thundered that God would curse his studies if he walked away, and Calvin gave in.
Q 11Which Spanish critic of the Trinity was burned at the stake in Geneva in 1553?
Michael Servetus
Michael Servetus. He had just escaped a Catholic prison at Vienne, where the court had to burn him in effigy instead; then he turned up in Geneva, was recognised and was arrested.
Q 12In which Geneva church did Calvin preach his sermons as leader of the city's Reformation?
St. Pierre Cathedral
St. Pierre Cathedral. Geneva's bishop had left the city, and within a few years his own cathedral was its chief Protestant church, with Calvin in the pulpit.
Q 13What is Geneva's Latin motto?
Post Tenebras Lux
Q 21Which Geneva landmark began in 1886 as a safety valve releasing excess pressure from the city's water-power network?
The Jet d'Eau
The Jet d'Eau. The first one rose about 30 metres beside the pumping station; the city liked the look of it, moved it out into the harbour in 1891, and today it throws lake water 140 metres up.
Q 22Which drinks brand was born in 18th-century Geneva, where its founder first sold his carbonated water?
Schweppes
Schweppes. Jacob Schweppe, a Geneva craftsman, read the chemists of his day, built his own machine to put the fizz into water, and later took the business to London.
Q 23Who founded the Red Cross in Geneva in 1863 and shared the first Nobel Peace Prize?
Henry Dunant
Post Tenebras Lux. It means 'after darkness, light', cut down from a line in the Latin Book of Job, 'after darkness I hope for light'; the Reformers dropped the hoping and made it their own motto.
Q 14Geneva's coat of arms sets a golden key beside half an eagle, the emblem of which empire?
The Holy Roman Empire
The Holy Roman Empire. Geneva's bishop ruled the town as a prince of that empire, so the arms join the emperor's eagle to the bishop's key, and the city kept both after it drove the bishop out.
Q 15Which December festival marks the failed Savoyard attack on Geneva in 1602?
L'Escalade
L'Escalade. Savoy's soldiers scaled the walls on ladders in the dark and were beaten back, and a ballad written about that night, Cé qu'è lainô, is still Geneva's anthem.
Q 16Genevans mark the defeat of a 1602 night attack by smashing a chocolate version of what?
A cauldron
A cauldron. Legend says a cook called Mère Royaume tipped her pot of hot soup from a window onto a Savoyard soldier; today the youngest and oldest in the room smash the chocolate one together.
Q 17The 1954 Geneva Accords ended a colonial war in Indochina by splitting which country at the 17th parallel?
Vietnam
Vietnam. The line was meant to be temporary, with nationwide elections due by 1956 to reunite the country; they were never held, and the division hardened into war.
Q 18What did the guard Isaac Mercier cut to foil the 1602 night attack on Geneva?
The portcullis rope
The portcullis rope. A Savoyard sapper was about to blow open the gate for the main force waiting outside; the iron grille crashed down in front of it, and the attack was lost.
Q 19Tradition links Geneva's September fast, the Jeûne genevois, to news of which event?
The St. Bartholomew's Day massacre
The St. Bartholomew's Day massacre. Geneva did fast when news of the 1572 killings of Protestants arrived, but the custom is older: its first known fast, in 1567, was for persecuted Protestants in Lyon.
Q 20Which giant wooden object with a shattered leg stands outside the UN in Geneva as a protest against landmines?
A chair
A chair. A charity for the disabled set the 12-metre Broken Chair on the square facing the UN in 1997, so that arriving diplomats would pass a reminder of landmine victims.
Henry Dunant. He went bankrupt in 1867, left Geneva and spent decades in poverty and obscurity, until a journalist tracked him down in 1895, six years before the Nobel.
Q 24The first Geneva Convention, signed in 1864, set out to protect which group in wartime?
Wounded soldiers
Wounded soldiers. To mark the medics and field hospitals that armies agreed to spare, the treaty adopted a new sign: a red cross on a white ground, the Swiss flag with its colours reversed.
Q 25The Geneva Protocol of 1925 banned the use in war of which weapon of the First World War?
Poison gas
Poison gas. The treaty outlawed germ warfare too, but it banned only the use of such weapons: countries could still make and stockpile them, a gap that stayed open for decades.
Q 26Which building is the home of the UN Office at Geneva?
Palace of Nations
Built for the League of Nations from 1929 to 1938, it was Europe's second-largest building complex by volume after Versailles.
Q 27Switzerland hosted the UN in Geneva for decades but joined it only in 2002, by what means?
A nationwide referendum
A nationwide referendum. Swiss voters had rejected membership in 1986; in March 2002 they changed their minds, making Switzerland the first country to join the UN by popular vote.
Q 28Which reformer, once pastor to English-speaking exiles in Geneva, stands beside Calvin on the Reformation Wall?
John Knox
John Knox. The Scot led Geneva's English-speaking refugee church in the 1550s, then took Calvin's model home and became the foremost leader of the Scottish Reformation.
Q 29A sculptor of Geneva's Reformation Wall, Paul Landowski, later helped create which world-famous statue?
Christ the Redeemer
Christ the Redeemer. He worked an ocean away: in his studio he built a four-metre model, and the head and hands were shaped there at full size before builders in Rio reproduced his work in concrete.
Q 30Which machine smashes protons together in a 27-kilometre ring buried beneath the border near Geneva?
The Large Hadron Collider
The Large Hadron Collider. CERN never dug a tunnel for it: the ring was bored in the 1980s for an electron collider, and the proton machine was slotted into the same tunnel after that one shut in 2000.