Lake Titicaca Trivia
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49 free Lake Titicaca trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
This Lake Titicaca trivia quiz covers the great lake shared by Peru and Bolivia, from its 3,812-metre surface to the reed islands floating on it. The easy questions ask which two countries share it, why it is called the highest navigable lake, which mountain range it sits in, what the Uros build their islands from and where the Incas believed the sun was born. Then it heads out onto the water: the strait that splits the lake in two, its single outlet, its 41 islands, the sedge that grows in its shallows and the trout that helped drive a native fish extinct. The hard end is for people who like their geography with stories attached: the British-built steamship carried over the Andes in 2,766 mule-loads and fired with llama dung, the Chilean torpedo boat that arrived by train, the island where only the men knit, the giant frog Jacques Cousteau measured at 60 centimetres, the flightless grebe, the Tiwanaku temples under the Inca ones, and the reef where the Incas dropped their offerings. Every answer was checked against the encyclopaedia entries on Lake Titicaca, the Uros, Isla del Sol, the Titicaca water frog and the ship Yavari before publishing, and the supporting sentence is stored with each question. Our Peru, Bolivia and world lakes quizzes are natural next stops.
30 of 49 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which indigenous people have farmed Lake Titicaca's terraced shores since before the Incas and still live around it today?
The Aymara
The Aymara: they were working the lake's stone terraces before the Incas arrived, and they later absorbed the island-dwelling Uros, who gave up their own language for Aymara.
Q 02Titicaca is often described as the world's highest what?
Navigable lake
Navigable lake: the title counts only lakes worked by large ships. Plenty of small pools lie far higher, among them one in the summit crater of Ojos del Salado, a volcano on the border of Chile and Argentina.
Q 03Lake Titicaca's surface lies about 3,810 metres up, higher than the summit of which famous mountain?
Mount Fuji
Mount Fuji: Japan's highest peak reaches only 3,776 metres, yet Puno, a city of more than 100,000 people, sits on Titicaca's shore above that height.
Q 04Titicaca is often called South America's largest lake, but which bigger Venezuelan rival, open to the sea, is sometimes ranked first?
Lake Maracaibo
Lake Maracaibo: at about 13,500 square kilometres it dwarfs Titicaca, but a strait links it to the Gulf of Venezuela and sea water mixes in, so many geographers class it as a bay or lagoon.
Q 05How have buses long crossed Lake Titicaca's Strait of Tiquina?
By barge
By barge: each bus is floated across on a flat pontoon while its passengers follow in a separate boat. A bridge has been proposed for decades, but the boatmen whose living it would end oppose it.
Q 06In Inca myth, which creator god made the sun, moon and stars from islands in Lake Titicaca?
Viracocha
Viracocha: in the Inca telling he first washed away a failed race of giants in a flood, then brought light to the dark world from the lake, which made Titicaca one of the most sacred places they knew.
Q 07The Río Desaguadero runs south from Lake Titicaca; what does desaguadero mean in Spanish?
Drain
Drain: a fitting name for the one river that empties the lake, though it is a feeble drain, carrying off only a small share of the water Titicaca loses each year.
Q 08How do visitors get around Isla del Sol, the largest island in Lake Titicaca?
On foot
On foot: the rocky, hilly island has no paved roads and no motor vehicles, so its farming families and their visitors all walk.
Q 09Lake Titicaca's great mass of water makes the climate along its shores what, compared with the surrounding plateau?
Milder
Milder: the water soaks up the sun's heat by day and gives it back at night, softening the plateau's harsh climate, which is why farms and villages crowd the lake's shores.
Q 10The "titi" in the name Titicaca is usually translated as which animal?
Puma
Puma: the usual reading of the name is "rock of the puma", after a sacred crag on Isla del Sol, but scholars call its meaning uncertain, and "crag of lead" is a rival translation.
Q 11In 2012 the Global Nature Fund gave Titicaca which unwelcome title?
Threatened Lake of the Year
Threatened Lake of the Year: the fund names one lake each year, and it picked Titicaca mainly because sewage from fast-growing lakeside cities such as Puno pours in largely untreated.
Q 12Which traditional leaf tea do hotels around Lake Titicaca offer new arrivals against altitude sickness?
Coca tea
Coca tea: at about 3,800 metres the thin air leaves many newcomers breathless and headachy, and a cup of mate de coca is the Andes' time-honoured welcome, though its benefit has never been properly tested.
Q 13The Uros people build their floating islands from layers of which plant?
Totora sedge
Q 21On the Peruvian island of Taquile, which craft is performed exclusively by males from the age of eight?
Knitting
Knitting: boys start at about eight, and the men turn out the island's fine earflapped chullo caps, while the women spin the wool and weave wide belts that record the farming year like a calendar.
Q 22In the 20th century, Bolivia used the remote Isla de la Luna in Lake Titicaca to hold whom?
Political prisoners
Political prisoners: the island jail held opponents of Bolivia's rulers behind high adobe walls and a moat of icy lake water, yet in 1972 dozens of inmates staged a famous escape.
Q 23Amantani island's twin peaks are named Pachatata and Pachamama; what does Pachamama mean?
Mother Earth
Totora sedge: fresh layers go on top as the bottom ones rot, and the same plant gives the Uros their boats, their houses and even a snack, since its tender base is eaten.
Q 14According to legend, why did the Uros originally build islands that floated?
To move away from hostile neighbours
To move away from hostile neighbours: the Uros are said to have built their islands as the Incas pushed into their lands, and a watchtower rises on many of them.
Q 15What stops the Uros' floating islands from drifting away across Lake Titicaca?
Ropes tied to the lakebed
Ropes tied to the lakebed: long cables tether the floating root blocks to each other and to stakes driven into the bottom, which holds the whole raft in place through wind and waves.
Q 16According to Uru legend, the Uros claimed to have blood of what colour, because they never felt the cold?
Black
They called themselves Lupihaques, 'sons of the Sun', and considered themselves the owners of the lake and its water.
Q 17Isla del Sol, the largest sacred island, is reached by boat from which Bolivian lakeside town?
Copacabana
Copacabana: its shrine to the Virgin of Copacabana, Bolivia's patron saint, was so revered that a chapel dedicated to her in Rio de Janeiro gave the famous beach district there its name.
Q 18What was the name of the Inca sun god, said to have been born on Lake Titicaca's Isla del Sol?
Inti
Inti: the Inca emperors claimed him as their ancestor and travelled to his temple on the island in pilgrimage once a year.
Q 19In one Inca origin legend, Manco Cápac and Mama Ocllo rose from Lake Titicaca before going on to found which city?
Cusco
Cusco: in this telling the Sun sent the pair to earth at the lake, and they travelled north to found the Inca capital. A rival version has the founders step out of a cave near Cusco instead.
Q 20Which novelist's The Confidence-Man opens with a stranger appearing "suddenly as Manco Capac at the lake Titicaca"?
Herman Melville
Herman Melville: the first Inca was said to have appeared at the lake as a child of the Sun, so the simile lends a touch of the miraculous to a mysterious stranger boarding a Mississippi steamboat at dawn.
Mother Earth: she is the earth-mother goddess of the Andes, whose worship outlasted both the Inca cult of the sun and the Spanish conquest and is still strong in the highlands today.
Q 24Boatbuilders from Lake Titicaca's Suriqui island built the ocean-going Ra II and Tigris for which Norwegian explorer?
Thor Heyerdahl
Thor Heyerdahl: his first papyrus boat broke up short of the Caribbean in 1969, so for Ra II he hired builders from the lake, and their craft carried him from Morocco to Barbados the next year.
Q 25Which pre-Inca civilisation, whose ruined capital stands near Lake Titicaca's southern shore, dominated the lake for centuries before the Incas?
Tiwanaku
Tiwanaku: its state grew up in the lake basin between about the 5th and 12th centuries, and the Incas who followed revered its ruins and raised their own island shrines on the same sacred ground.
Q 26Offerings raised by divers from Khoa reef, off Lake Titicaca's Isla del Sol, include incense burners shaped like which animal?
Felines
Felines: the burners were sunk together with sacrificed young llamas and ornaments of gold, shell and stone, in state rituals held on the lake centuries before the Incas arrived.
Q 27Which Bolivian salt lake, fed by Lake Titicaca's outflow, dried up completely in 2015?
Lake Poopó
Lake Poopó: once Bolivia's second-largest lake and the fishing ground of the communities around it, it vanished after years of drought and the diversion of its water for mining and farming.
Q 28The Titicaca orestias, a native fish last seen in the 1930s, was probably wiped out by which fish introduced to the lake?
Trout
Trout: several kinds were released into the lake from the late 1930s and, along with a silverside brought from Argentina, they ate or outcompeted the big native killifish within a few decades.
Q 29What unflattering nickname has Lake Titicaca's loose-skinned amphibian Telmatobius culeus earned?
Titicaca scrotum frog
Titicaca scrotum frog: the baggy folds stand in for its undersized lungs, giving a huge surface for soaking up oxygen from the cold water, so it can live its whole life beneath the surface.
Q 30Which explorer's late-1960s expedition filmed Lake Titicaca's giant frogs and reported some weighing a kilogram?
Jacques Cousteau
Jacques Cousteau: he had come to hunt for sunken Inca treasure with mini-submarines and found frogs instead, filming them on the bottom some 120 metres down, deeper than any frog had been seen before.