Mauritius Trivia
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49 free Mauritius trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Mauritius is a volcanic island 2,000 km off the African coast that nobody lived on until the Dutch arrived in 1598, and which has since been shaped by French planters, British administrators, enslaved Africans and Malagasy, and half a million indentured Indians. It is the only country in Africa where Hinduism is the largest religion, and the only known home of the dodo. This quiz covers the geography (the Mascarenes, Rodrigues, Agaléga, the disputed Chagos Archipelago and Piton de la Petite Rivière Noire), the colonial story from Isle de France to the 1810 surrender and the 1968 independence, and the republic that followed in 1992. Culture and daily life get plenty of room: Mauritian Creole and Bhojpuri, sega music and the ravanne, dholl puri and gâteau piment, the Champ de Mars racecourse, the Post Office stamps that are the holy grail of philately, the two UNESCO sites, the Four Bands flag and the first Olympic medal in 2008. Easy questions ask which ocean the island sits in; hard ones want the Dutch prince it is named for, the year of the last dodo sighting and the island where slaves are said to have leapt to their deaths. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on Mauritius, the dodo, the flag, sega and Le Morne Brabant, and each question carries the sentence that supports it.
30 of 49 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Mauritius lies east of which much larger island?
Madagascar
Madagascar. Mauritius lies well to its east and had no inhabitants at all when the Dutch claimed it in 1598, so its whole population descends from people who arrived later.
Q 02What is the capital and largest city of Mauritius?
Port Louis
Port Louis. French governor Mahé de La Bourdonnais founded it in the 1730s as a stop for ships rounding the Cape, and it lost much of that traffic when the Suez Canal opened in 1869.
Q 03Mauritius and French Réunion belong to which island group?
The Mascarene Islands
The Mascarene Islands. Réunion is still an overseas department of France, so the island next door to Mauritius is part of the eurozone.
Q 04Mauritius was named in 1598 in honour of whom?
Maurice, Prince of Orange
Maurice, Prince of Orange. Admiral Wybrand van Warwyck named the empty island for the Dutch head of state in 1598; the Dutch gave up on it by 1710, but their name for it outlasted them.
Q 05Under French rule from 1715, Mauritius was known by what name?
Isle de France
Isle de France. The name lasted until the British captured the island in 1810 and brought back the old Dutch one, though the settlers kept their French language, laws and customs.
Q 06Which Dutch navigator set out from Mauritius in 1642 and became the first European to reach New Zealand?
Abel Tasman
Abel Tasman. On the same voyage he named his first landfall Van Diemen's Land after his patron; the island was later renamed Tasmania after Tasman himself.
Q 07Which American author's 1897 travel book records a local's boast that heaven was copied after Mauritius?
Mark Twain
Mark Twain. In Following the Equator he reports one citizen's claim that Mauritius was made first and heaven copied from it, then adds that another citizen calls this an exaggeration.
Q 08Which British explorer, fresh from sailing right around Australia, was held on Mauritius for over six years?
Matthew Flinders
Matthew Flinders. He put in with a leaking ship in 1803, and Governor Decaen, said to have taken him for a spy, kept him there even after Napoleon approved his release in 1806.
Q 09Which 1788 French novel by Bernardin de Saint-Pierre is a love story set on Mauritius?
Paul et Virginie
Paul et Virginie. Its author knew the setting first-hand: he had served on the island as an army engineer from 1768 to 1771, twenty years before the book came out.
Q 10Which crop dominated Mauritius's economy from the 18th century until independence?
Sugar
The island was the British Empire's main producer of it.
Q 11After slavery ended, Mauritius's planters brought around half a million indentured labourers from which country?
India
India. The workers were shipped in to cut cane from 1834, and their descendants now make up about two-thirds of all Mauritians.
Q 12What did Mauritius become in 1992?
A republic
A republic. Independence in 1968 had left Queen Elizabeth II as head of state; 24 years later to the day, a Mauritian president took her place.
Q 13Which independence leader, whose name is on Mauritius's main airport, became the country's first prime minister?
Sir Seewoosagur Ramgoolam
Sir Seewoosagur Ramgoolam. A doctor by training, he won the first election held under universal suffrage in 1959 and went on to lead the country until 1982.
Q 21Which flightless bird, extinct soon after human settlement, lived only on Mauritius?
The dodo
The dodo. It was gone within a century of the Dutch landing in 1598, done in by hunters and, probably more, by the pigs, rats, cats and dogs that came ashore with them and ate its eggs.
Q 22What is the closest living relative of the dodo?
The Nicobar pigeon
The Nicobar pigeon. DNA from the dodo remains kept in Oxford points to this colourful island pigeon of South-East Asia, which makes the dodo an outsized pigeon that gave up flying.
Q 23Which children's classic has a Dodo who organises a 'Caucus-race'?
Alice in Wonderland
Q 14Mauritius's final court of appeal is based in which city?
London
London. Mauritius has been independent since 1968, yet its court of last resort is still a British tribunal, the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council.
Q 15Which island group did the UK split from Mauritius in 1965 to form its Indian Ocean Territory?
Chagos
Chagos. Britain removed the islanders to make way for a US military base, and in 2019 the International Court of Justice advised that the 1965 split had been unlawful.
Q 16Under the treaty Mauritius and Britain signed in May 2025, which island stays on a 99-year British lease?
Diego Garcia
Diego Garcia. The treaty gives Mauritius sovereignty over the surrounding islands while Britain keeps running the atoll's US military base; by early 2026 it was signed but not yet in force.
Q 17Satellite and aerial images of Mauritius's south-west tip appear to show which natural wonder?
An underwater waterfall
An underwater waterfall. It is an optical illusion: the shallow shelf drops away to thousands of metres, and sand drifting over the edge looks like the sea pouring into a chasm.
Q 18Which autonomous island of Mauritius lies more than 500 km east of the main island?
Rodrigues
Rodrigues. Most of its people descend from enslaved Africans brought by French colonists, and since 2002 the island has run its everyday affairs through its own regional assembly.
Q 19Mauritius's highest peak rises 828 metres, matching the height of which skyscraper?
Burj Khalifa
Burj Khalifa. The peak, Piton de la Petite Rivière Noire, only just holds its title: Pieter Both, a rock spire crowned with a huge boulder, stands about eight metres lower.
Q 20Which natural process built the island of Mauritius?
Undersea volcanic eruptions
Undersea volcanic eruptions. The lava is geologically young, yet its sands hold far older zircon crystals, which geologists read as traces of a lost continent, Mauritia, buried beneath the island.
Alice in Wonderland. Carroll's Dodo lets everyone run in circles, then rules that all have won and all must have prizes; the real bird had last been reliably seen in 1662, two centuries earlier.
Q 24Which of these endemic Mauritian birds has survived thanks to intensive conservation?
Pink pigeon
Pink pigeon. As few as ten were left in the wild before a captive-breeding colony set up by the Durrell trust rebuilt the flock to a few hundred birds.
Q 25Which religion has the most followers in Mauritius?
Hinduism
Hinduism. About half of Mauritians are Hindu, a legacy of the plantation workers shipped in during the 1800s; Christians, mostly Catholic, make up about a third.
Q 26What is the mother tongue of most Mauritians?
Mauritian Creole
Mauritian Creole. It is built on French, the language of the colonists who ran the island until 1810, and it outlasted more than 150 years of British rule to stay the everyday tongue.
Q 27Which naturalist visited Mauritius in 1836 and rode the only elephant then on the island?
Charles Darwin
Charles Darwin. He spent ten days on Mauritius near the end of the Beagle voyage, and what surprised him most about the borrowed elephant, he wrote, was its 'quite noiseless step'.
Q 28The traditional music of Mauritius, rooted in the songs of slaves, is called what?
Sega
Sega. Singers make up the words as they go while the tempo climbs, and the dancers circle each other in short, shuffling steps; UNESCO lists it as intangible cultural heritage.
Q 29Mauritius is one of the few countries to get by without which institution?
A standing army
A standing army. When the British garrison left in 1960, defence passed to the police, whose paramilitary Special Mobile Force and coast guard still do the job.
Q 30Which Mauritian street food is a soft flatbread stuffed with ground yellow split peas?
Dholl puri
Dholl puri. Rolled around bean curry and chutney, it grew out of the flatbreads that plantation workers brought with them and remade with whatever the island had to hand.