Guyana Trivia
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60 free Guyana trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Guyana is the only English-speaking country on the South American mainland, a place that drives on the left, plays cricket for the West Indies, sits below sea level behind a seawall, and hides a waterfall roughly four and a half times the height of Niagara in its rainforest. Since 2015 it has also become the fastest-growing economy on Earth thanks to offshore oil. This Guyana trivia quiz covers all of that and more. Fifty-six questions run from geography (Kaieteur Falls, Mount Roraima, the Essequibo, Shell Beach) through history (Dutch colonies, British Guiana, independence in 1966, Jonestown, Cheddi Jagan and Forbes Burnham) to national symbols (the Golden Arrowhead, the hoatzin, the giant water lily), food (pepperpot, El Dorado rum), music (Eddy Grant) and sport (Chanderpaul, Providence Stadium, the 2019 Gold Cup). Roughly a third are easy, a third medium, and the rest are for people who really know the Guianas. Every answer has been checked against encyclopaedia and official pages, so the dates, heights and names are ones you can rely on.
30 of 60 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01What is the capital and largest city of Guyana?
Georgetown
Georgetown sits at the mouth of the Demerara River, much of it below high-tide level behind a long seawall, and is laid out on a Dutch-style grid of canals.
Q 02Guyana is the only country in mainland South America with which official language?
English
English, inherited from British rule, is the sole official language, making Guyana unique on the South American mainland; most people speak Guyanese Creole day to day.
Q 03The name "Guyana" comes from an Indigenous Amerindian word meaning what?
Land of many waters
'Guyana' derives from an Amerindian word usually rendered 'land of many waters'; the Guianas once named a larger region stretching from the Orinoco to the Amazon.
Q 04What is Guyana's currency?
Guyanese dollar
The Guyanese dollar has been the currency since 1965, when it replaced the British West Indies dollar at par; it is issued by the Bank of Guyana, founded the same year.
Q 05In which year did Britain merge its three former Dutch colonies into the single colony of British Guiana?
1831
Britain united the three colonies it had formally acquired under the 1814 Anglo-Dutch Treaty into the single colony of British Guiana on 21 July 1831.
Q 06In which year did Guyana gain independence from the United Kingdom?
1966
Guyana became independent on 26 May 1966, the first of the three Guianas to leave European rule; it stayed in the Commonwealth and keeps the date as Independence Day.
Q 07In which year did Guyana become a republic?
1970
Guyana became the Co-operative Republic of Guyana in 1970, replacing the British monarch as head of state with a ceremonial president, Arthur Chung, while staying in the Commonwealth.
Q 08The annual Mashramani festival, held on 23 February, celebrates what event?
Guyana becoming a republic
Mashramani marks Guyana becoming a republic, with costume bands and floats through the capital; the name is said to come from an Arawak word for a celebration after cooperative work.
Q 09How many people died in the 1978 Jonestown mass murder-suicide in northwest Guyana?
918
The toll was 918: 909 at Jonestown itself, five at the Port Kaituma airstrip and four at the Temple's house in the capital; the settlement's formal name was the Peoples Temple Agricultural Project.
Q 10Which US congressman was murdered at the Port Kaituma airstrip on the day of the Jonestown deaths?
Leo Ryan
Leo Ryan, a California Democrat, had flown in to investigate the commune; Temple gunmen shot him and four others dead at the airstrip on 18 November 1978, hours before the poisonings.
Q 11Which former US president oversaw Guyana's 1992 elections, the first recognised as free and fair since 1964?
Jimmy Carter
Jimmy Carter's Carter Center led the international observers for the October 1992 vote, which ended 28 years of People's National Congress rule and was the first accepted as free and fair since 1964.
Q 12Which Guyanese dentist-turned-leader became in 1953 the first Hindu to head a government outside the subcontinent?
Cheddi Jagan
Cheddi Jagan, a Northwestern-trained dentist, became chief minister in 1953 after the colony's first universal-suffrage election; Britain suspended the constitution within months, and his American-born wife Janet later became president.
Q 13Who served as Guyana's first executive president, from 1980 until his death in 1985?
Q 21Which town on the Demerara River is the centre of Guyana's bauxite industry?
Linden
Linden, about 100 km up the Demerara River, combines the former bauxite towns of Mackenzie, Wismar and Christianburg; the Demerara Bauxite Company began mining there in 1916.
Q 22Which British geologist led the party that first brought Kaieteur Falls to European attention in 1870?
Charles Barrington Brown
Charles Barrington Brown, a government geologist surveying the colony, reached the falls on 24 April 1870 and returned in 1871 to measure them; he described the trip in Canoe and Camp Life in British Guiana (1876).
Q 23Which table-top mountain of the Pakaraima range is Guyana's highest point?
Mount Roraima
Forbes Burnham
Forbes Burnham led Guyana from December 1964, as premier and then prime minister, before the 1980 constitution made him executive president; he nationalised the bauxite and sugar industries.
Q 14Which Guyanese historian, author of How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, was killed in 1980?
Walter Rodney
Walter Rodney, a founder of the Working People's Alliance, earned his SOAS doctorate at 24 and was killed at 38 on 13 June 1980 when a bomb hidden in a walkie-talkie exploded in his car.
Q 15Who became Guyana's president after the disputed 2020 election?
Irfaan Ali
Irfaan Ali of the People's Progressive Party/Civic was sworn in on 2 August 2020, five months after the March vote, once a recount confirmed his party's win over David Granger's coalition.
Q 16Which neighbour claims the territory west of Guyana's longest river, two-thirds of the country?
Venezuela
Venezuela claims everything west of the river, about two-thirds of Guyana; an 1899 Paris tribunal awarded the land to British Guiana, Venezuela revived the claim in 1962, and Guyana took it to the International Court of Justice in 2018.
Q 17Which is the longest river in Guyana, at about 1,010 km?
Essequibo
The Essequibo rises in the Acarai Mountains on the Brazilian border and runs about 1,010 km north to the Atlantic, where large islands such as Leguan and Wakenaam sit in its mouth.
Q 18Which river forms Guyana's border with Suriname?
Courentyne
The Courentyne, roughly 720 km long, is Guyana's second-longest river; the two countries dispute the New River Triangle, also called the Tigri Area, near its headwaters.
Q 19Kaieteur Falls plunges over which river?
Potaro
The Potaro River drops off the Pakaraima plateau at Kaieteur before joining the country's longest river; the falls lie inside Kaieteur National Park, established in 1929.
Q 20How high is the single sheer drop of Kaieteur Falls?
226 m
The main plunge is 226 m, one of the tallest single-drop waterfalls in the world; adding the cascades below brings the total to 251 m, and average flow is about 663 cubic metres per second.
Mount Roraima's 2,810 m summit lies across the western border; Guyana's high point, 2,772 m, is on the plateau's northern prong where three countries meet.
Q 24Guyana's tepuis are said to have inspired which 1912 novel by Arthur Conan Doyle?
The Lost World
The Lost World (1912) put Professor Challenger's dinosaurs on a flat-topped plateau cut off by sheer cliffs, an idea drawn from accounts of the tepuis, whose isolated summits hold species found nowhere else.
Q 25In Pemon, the name of Guyana's highest mountain combines words meaning "great" and which colour?
Blue-green
In Pemon, roroi means blue-green and ma means great, so the name reads 'great blue-green'; Everard im Thurn and Harry Perkins made the first recorded ascent in 1884.
Q 26What is Guyana's national bird, also known as the Canje pheasant?
Hoatzin
The hoatzin is the sole surviving species of its family, Opisthocomidae; it ferments leaves in its crop, earning the name stinkbird, and its chicks have claws on their wings.
Q 27Which giant water lily is Guyana's national flower and appears on its coat of arms?
Victoria amazonica
Victoria amazonica, whose floating leaves can exceed two metres across, is native to the Amazon basin and Guyana's rivers; its flowers open white on the first night and turn pink on the second.
Q 28Which animals serve as the supporters on Guyana's coat of arms?
Jaguars
Two jaguars flank the shield, one holding a pickaxe for mining and the other sugar cane and a rice stalk for the sugar and rice industries.
Q 29What is Guyana's national motto?
One People, One Nation, One Destiny
'One People, One Nation, One Destiny' appears on the scroll beneath the shield; the crest above is an Amerindian head-dress, the Cacique's Crown, flanked by two diamonds for the mining industry.
Q 30By what name is Guyana's national flag known?
The Golden Arrowhead
The Golden Arrowhead, hoisted at independence, takes its name from the gold arrow pointing across a green field; red stands for zeal, green for farmland and forests, black for endurance and white for the rivers.