Netherlands Trivia
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7correct to beat the crowd
This Netherlands trivia quiz has 100 free questions with answers and goes well beyond tulips and windmills. It starts with the land itself - the twelve provinces, the polders and dikes, the Afsluitdijk and the Delta Works built after the 1953 flood, an airport that sits entirely below sea level - and then works through the history that made the country: William the Silent and the Eighty Years' War, the VOC and tulip mania, the Rampjaar, New Amsterdam, Anne Frank, the Hunger Winter and Arnhem. From there it turns to Dutch life: King's Day, Sinterklaas arriving by steamboat, stroopwafels and the Alkmaar cheese market, Kinderdijk's windmills and Keukenhof's tulips. Art gets its due with Rembrandt, Vermeer, Van Gogh and Mondrian, sport with Cruyff, Euro 1988, speed skating, Fanny Blankers-Koen and Max Verstappen, and there are questions on the monarchy, Prinsjesdag, the world's first same-sex marriage law and Dutch science from Leeuwenhoek's microscopes to the pendulum clock and Wi-Fi. About a third of the questions are easy enough for anyone who has visited Amsterdam; the rest climb toward the detail only a true Nederland fan would know. Every answer has been checked against Wikipedia and the primary sources it cites, and each explanation adds one more thing worth knowing.
30 of 100 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which Dutch province shares its name with a neighbouring Belgian province?
Limburg
Limburg was a single territory until Belgium broke away from the Netherlands in the 1830s; the border finally agreed in 1839 left a province called Limburg on each side.
Q 02Which non-capital city is the seat of the Dutch government, parliament and Supreme Court?
The Hague
The Hague has been the seat of government since the days of the Dutch Republic, yet the official capital is Amsterdam, where neither the cabinet nor parliament sits.
Q 03Roughly what share of the Netherlands' land area lies below sea level?
26%
26%, about a quarter of the country, lies below sea level, and roughly half of it sits no more than a metre above; dikes, dunes and pumps are all that keep it dry.
Q 04Which two countries meet the Netherlands at the Vaalserberg?
Belgium and Germany
Belgium and Germany meet the Netherlands at the Three-Country Point, 322 metres up; for most of the 19th century a fourth territory, tiny Neutral Moresnet, touched the same spot.
Q 05Which Netherlands province, established in 1986, was reclaimed from the former Zuiderzee?
Flevoland
Flevoland lay under water within living memory: its polders were pumped dry between 1942 and 1968, and its capital, Lelystad, is named after the engineer who planned the whole scheme.
Q 06When the 32 km Afsluitdijk sealed off the Zuiderzee in 1932, the salt inlet became which freshwater lake?
IJsselmeer
IJsselmeer: once the dam shut out the North Sea tides, the salt was gradually flushed away, and a stormy arm of the sea became a calm freshwater lake.
Q 07The Delta Works, a vast system of dams and storm-surge barriers, were commissioned in response to which disaster?
The 1953 North Sea flood
The 1953 North Sea flood drowned more than 1,800 people in the Netherlands; the answer was to dam the estuaries and shorten the coastline, so that far fewer dikes were left facing the sea.
Q 08Which Dutch city completed the world's largest bicycle garage, with 12,500 spaces, beside its main station in 2019?
Utrecht
Utrecht built it for a country that owns more bicycles than it has people and makes more than a quarter of all its journeys by bike.
Q 09The Netherlands sits at the mouths of the Rhine, the Maas and which third major European river?
Scheldt
Scheldt: its mouth is Dutch but its great port, Antwerp, is not, and after 1585 the Dutch Republic closed the river to shipping for generations to choke off its rival's trade.
Q 10Amsterdam's Schiphol Airport stands on what kind of site?
A drained lake bed
A drained lake bed: the Haarlemmermeer, a lake big enough to stage a naval battle in the 1570s, was pumped dry in the 19th century, so planes now land several metres below sea level.
Q 11Which Dutch province gave its name to a country first charted by Abel Tasman?
Zeeland
Zeeland: Tasman himself called the land Staten Land, thinking it joined territory off South America, so it was Dutch mapmakers who renamed it Nova Zeelandia, later anglicised.
Q 12What does the name 'Netherlands' literally mean?
Lower countries
Lower countries: 'nether' is an old word for lower, and the name once covered the whole low-lying region, which is why 'the Low Countries' still takes in Belgium and Luxembourg.
Q 13Which city's centre was destroyed by Luftwaffe bombing on 14 May 1940, prompting Dutch surrender?
Rotterdam
Rotterdam's old centre burned in a single raid that left tens of thousands homeless; when the Germans threatened other cities with the same, the Dutch command surrendered.
Q 21Sent on from Auschwitz, Anne Frank died in which concentration camp?
Bergen-Belsen
Bergen-Belsen: Anne and her sister Margot died there, probably of typhus, in February or March 1945, not long before British troops freed the camp; of the family, only their father Otto survived.
Q 22What do the Dutch call the winter of 1944–45, when a German blockade cut off the occupied western provinces?
Hunger Winter
Hunger Winter: about 20,000 people died and soup kitchens were boiling sugar beets and potato peelings before, in the war's last days, Allied bombers dropped food instead of bombs.
Q 23Operation Market Garden failed to capture the Rhine bridge in which Dutch city?
Arnhem
Q 14Batavia, the Asian headquarters of the Dutch East India Company (VOC), is today which city?
Jakarta
Jakarta: the Dutch East India Company seized the port of Jayakarta in 1619 and built its own headquarters town on the site, and the name Batavia lasted until the 1940s.
Q 15William the Silent, leader of the Dutch Revolt, was shot dead by Balthasar Gérard in 1584 in which city?
Delft
Delft still shows the bullet holes in the wall of the Prinsenhof, and because William was buried in the town's Nieuwe Kerk, the Dutch royal family has been laid to rest there ever since.
Q 16The first letters of the 15 stanzas of the Dutch national anthem spell out what?
Willem van Nassov
Willem van Nassov is an old spelling of William of Nassau, in whose voice the song is sung; the Dutch sang it from the 1570s, yet it became the official anthem only in 1932.
Q 17Which spirit, copied by English distillers from a Dutch drink, set off London's 18th-century 'craze'?
Gin
Gin is short for 'geneva', an English mangling of the Dutch genever, meaning juniper, the berry that flavours both drinks; the Swiss city of Geneva has nothing to do with it.
Q 18The Eighty Years' War, ended by the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, won Dutch independence from which crown?
Spain
Spain's Habsburg kings had inherited the Low Countries, and the revolt against them that began in 1568 ended only when the Spanish crown recognised the Dutch Republic at Münster.
Q 19In the famous Dutch bubble of 1637, what sold for a small fortune?
Tulip bulbs
Tulip bulbs of rare varieties could fetch more than ten times a skilled craftsman's yearly income, until doubts set in and the whole market collapsed almost overnight.
Q 20In 1672 the Dutch halted which invading kingdom's army by deliberately flooding a strip of their own land?
France
France had overrun much of the republic when the Dutch opened the sluices of the Holland Water Line and stopped its army short of Amsterdam; they still call 1672 the Rampjaar, the disaster year.
Arnhem: a small British airborne force held one end of the bridge for four days, waiting for tanks that never arrived, the stand retold in the book and film A Bridge Too Far.
Q 24Which American city began life in the 1620s as the Dutch settlement of New Amsterdam?
New York
New York: the English seized the town in 1664 and renamed it for the Duke of York, but the Dutch left their mark: Wall Street follows the line of the wall they built across Manhattan.
Q 25Signed in 1992, the treaty that created the European Union takes its name from which Dutch city?
Maastricht
Maastricht gave its name to the treaty that turned the European Community into the European Union, created a shared EU citizenship and set the course for a single currency, the euro.
Q 26Which Dutch national holiday, held on 27 April, turns city streets into one big flea market?
King's Day
King's Day marks Willem-Alexander's birthday, and it is the one day of the year when anyone may sell on the street without a permit, so whole cities turn into a second-hand market.
Q 27How does Sinterklaas traditionally arrive in the Netherlands each November?
By steamboat
By steamboat, to a nationally televised welcome; among the descendants of Dutch settlers in America, the name Sinterklaas was worn down into Santa Claus.
Q 28The stroopwafel, two thin waffles glued with caramel syrup, was first made in which South Holland city?
Gouda
Gouda's bakers, probably Gerard Kamphuisen first, are said to have stuck leftover dough and crumbs together with syrup, turning the bakery's scraps into a sweet treat.
Q 29Which North Holland city holds a famous Friday cheese market where deals end with a hand clap?
Alkmaar
Alkmaar's guild of cheese porters still works the market in teams, each marked by a different coloured straw hat, hauling the cheese to the weigh house on heavy wooden barrows.
Q 30Which UNESCO-listed Dutch village is known for its 19 windmills, built around 1740?
Kinderdijk
Kinderdijk's mills kept the low-lying polder dry for well over a century, until sinking land and rising water forced the water boards to bring in steam pumping stations.