National Park
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141 free National Park trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
10 free National Park trivia questions with answers. National Park trivia lives in two places on BrainPickle. This page is the shorter set; the main quiz is National Parks trivia, with our deepest question pool on the topic and a source behind every answer.
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Q 01Which U.S. state contains the highest number of national parks?
California
California has nine national parks, one more than Alaska, though Alaska's are far bigger: the four largest parks in the country are all there.
Q 02Africa's highest mountain, a snow-capped volcano, gives its name to which national park?
Kilimanjaro
Kilimanjaro National Park, created in 1973, covers the 5,895-metre volcano above its tree line; the famous summit ice has shrunk by roughly four-fifths since 1912.
Q 03Banff, proclaimed in 1885, was the first national park of which country?
Canada
Canada's Banff National Park began in 1885 as the Banff Hot Springs Reserve, a 26-square-kilometre tract around the Cave and Basin springs, after rival claims to the springs.
Q 04More than a million of which animal make up the bulk of the Serengeti's great migration?
Wildebeest
Wildebeest, well over a million of them, circle the Serengeti and Kenya's Masai Mara each year, following the rains to fresh grass, with about a quarter of a million zebra alongside.
Q 05Kruger, spanning Limpopo and Mpumalanga, became the first national park of which country in 1926?
South Africa
South Africa made Kruger its first national park in 1926 by merging two game reserves; the older was proclaimed in 1898 under President Paul Kruger to stop hunters wiping out the game.
Q 06The world's largest national park covers the north-east of which island?
Greenland
Greenland's north-east is a national park of about 972,000 square kilometres, bigger than all but some thirty countries, yet it has no permanent residents.
Q 07The Galapagos Islands are protected as the first national park of which country?
Ecuador
Ecuador declared the Galápagos its first national park in 1959, the centenary of Darwin's On the Origin of Species, protecting about 97 percent of the islands' land.
Q 08Indonesia founded a Lesser Sunda national park in 1980 to protect which reptile?
Komodo dragon
The Komodo dragon, the world's largest lizard, reached Western science only in the early 1910s, after a Dutch colonial officer followed up rumours of a 'land crocodile' on the island.
Q 09Tongariro, whose peaks were conveyed to the Crown in 1887, is the oldest national park in which country?
New Zealand
Tongariro was New Zealand's first national park: Ngāti Tūwharetoa chief Te Heuheu Tūkino IV gifted the sacred peaks to the Crown in 1887, and the Tongariro National Park Act passed in 1894.
Q 10Which country is home to the UNESCO-listed Plitvice Lakes national park?
Croatia
Croatia's Plitvice Lakes are sixteen lakes held back by natural dams of porous rock; mosses and algae trap minerals from the water to build it, so the barriers are still growing today.
Q 11The second US national park, created in 1875 and later handed to Michigan, covered much of which island?
Mackinac Island
Mackinac Island's park lasted twenty years, with soldiers from its fort acting as caretakers; when the Army closed the fort in 1895, the land became Michigan's first state park.
Q 12Australia's first national park, proclaimed near Sydney in 1879, got what name in 1955?
Royal
Royal National Park was simply called 'National Park' until 1955, when it was renamed after Queen Elizabeth II passed through by train on her 1954 tour of Australia.
Q 13Which Nordic country created Europe's first national parks, nine at once, in 1909?
Sweden
Q 21The word Yosemite comes from a Miwok term meaning what?
They are killers
'They are killers' (yohhe'meti) was what neighbouring Miwok called the valley's Ahwahneechee people; the name was long confused with a similar Miwok word for grizzly bear.
Q 22Which president signed the act making the Grand Canyon a national park in 1919?
Woodrow Wilson
Woodrow Wilson signed the Grand Canyon National Park Act on 26 February 1919, ending a wait of nearly four decades: park bills had been failing in Congress since 1882.
Q 23Kruger National Park's long eastern boundary is also an international border with which country?
Mozambique
Sweden opened nine parks at once in 1909, Europe's first; one of them, Stora Sjöfallet, soon lost most of its great waterfall when the government allowed a hydropower scheme.
Q 14Virunga, founded in 1925 as Africa's first national park, lies in which country?
DR Congo
DR Congo's Virunga began as Albert National Park after American naturalist Carl Akeley, who had shot gorillas there for a museum, urged Belgium's King Albert I to protect them instead.
Q 15The United Kingdom's first national park, designated in 1951, was which?
The Peak District
The Peak District was designated in April 1951, nineteen years after ramblers staged a mass trespass on the private moorland of Kinder Scout to demand the right to walk there.
Q 16Which English poet called the Lake District a 'sort of national property' in 1810?
William Wordsworth
William Wordsworth wrote that everyone 'who has an eye to perceive and a heart to enjoy' had a right to the Lakes, yet in the 1840s he campaigned against the railway that would bring crowds to Windermere.
Q 17Which wartime president signed the grant that first protected Yosemite Valley as a public park?
Abraham Lincoln
Abraham Lincoln signed the Yosemite Grant on 30 June 1864, in the middle of the Civil War, entrusting the valley to the state of California, which handed it back to federal control in 1906.
Q 18Who is known as the 'Father of the National Parks' for his work in Yosemite?
John Muir
John Muir's articles helped make Yosemite a national park in 1890; in 1903 he took the sitting president camping in its backcountry and persuaded him the valley needed federal protection too.
Q 19Nahuel Huapi, grown from land explorer Francisco 'Perito' Moreno donated in 1903, is the oldest national park in which country?
Argentina
Argentina had rewarded Moreno with land around the Patagonian lake for his frontier surveys; in 1903 he gave part of it back to become a park, citing the example of the United States.
Q 20New River Gorge, the newest US national park as of 2025, lies in which state?
West Virginia
West Virginia's New River Gorge became a national park and preserve in December 2020; despite its name, the New River is considered one of the oldest rivers in North America.
Mozambique's Limpopo National Park was linked to Kruger in a cross-border peace park in 2002; fences began to come down, and elephants were moved across to restock land emptied by war.
Q 24Which Fiordland bird, presumed extinct, was rediscovered in the Murchison Mountains in 1948?
Takahē
The takahē had gone unseen since 1898 when Geoffrey Orbell, an Invercargill doctor leading a planned search, found the last wild population in a valley above Lake Te Anau.
Q 25Sagarmatha National Park in Nepal, established in 1976, tops out at the summit of which peak?
Mount Everest
Mount Everest is Sagarmatha in Nepali; the park climbs from 2,845 metres to the 8,848-metre summit and stops there, because the border with China crosses the very top.
Q 26Which country's park lies directly across the river from Argentina's Iguazú National Park?
Brazil
Brazil's Iguaçu National Park, spelled the Portuguese way, faces Argentina's across the river; most of the falls are on the Argentine side, though the river runs through Brazil for most of its course.
Q 27Chitwan, Nepal's first national park, was created mainly to save which animal?
The one-horned rhinoceros
The one-horned rhinoceros had crashed from about 800 animals in Chitwan in 1950 to 95 by the late 1960s as settlers cleared the valley and poachers moved in, so Nepal made it a park.
Q 28Which Northern Territory park, about the size of Wales, was a filming location for Crocodile Dundee?
Kakadu
Kakadu is mostly Aboriginal land, leased back by its traditional owners so that it can be run as a national park, and they manage it jointly with Parks Australia.
Q 29Which uranium mine, shut down in January 2021, is surrounded by a Northern Territory national park?
Ranger
The Ranger mine near Jabiru processed its last ore in January 2021 after four decades; its Mirarr traditional owners had told the operator in 2015 that they would not support any extension.
Q 30Under what name did President Taft protect the future Zion National Park as a monument in 1909?
Mukuntuweap
Mukuntuweap, thought to be the canyon's Paiute name, lasted nine years: in 1918 the monument was renamed Zion, partly from a belief that visitors would skip a place they could not pronounce.