Pyrenees Trivia
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49 free Pyrenees trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Sep 2026.
This Pyrenees trivia quiz covers the mountain range that walls off the Iberian Peninsula from the rest of Europe. The easy questions handle the basics: which countries it divides, the microstate tucked inside it, the highest peak, the Song of Roland and the big white dogs that guard its flocks. From there it moves through the geology, the cirques and gaves, the passes from Roncevaux to Envalira, the desman and the brown bears, and the languages spoken along the range. The harder half is for geography and history buffs: the Bay of Biscay's role in raising the mountains, Xatardia and the saxifrages, the talc pit at Trimoun, the Pic du Midi telescope that photographed the Moon for Apollo, the Odeillo solar furnace, Pheasant Island and the treaty that left Llívia stranded in France, and the Gascon meaning of Tourmalet. If you have played our mountains or France and Spain quizzes, this is the deep dive on one range. Every answer was checked against the encyclopaedia entries for the Pyrenees, the treaty, the Tourmalet, Roncevaux and the Pyrenean Mountain Dog before publishing.
30 of 49 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01The Pyrenees form the border between which two countries?
France and Spain
France and Spain share the crest as their border, with a few quirks: the Val d'Aran lies on the northern, French-facing slope yet belongs to Spain.
Q 02The Pyrenees meet the Mediterranean at Cap de Creus, on which Spanish coast?
Costa Brava
Costa Brava takes in the last spur of the Pyrenees, Cap de Creus; Salvador Dalí lived beside the cape and put its craggy cliffs into The Persistence of Memory.
Q 03What is the highest peak in the Pyrenees?
Aneto
Aneto saves its scare for the very end: the summit lies beyond the Paso de Mahoma, or Muhammad's Bridge, a short, narrow rock ridge with an exposed drop on either side.
Q 04Which microstate lies entirely within the Pyrenees?
Andorra
Andorra has two heads of state who live elsewhere: the French president and a Catalan bishop, the Bishop of Urgell, reign jointly as its co-princes.
Q 05In one Roman legend, the Pyrenees are named for Pyrene, a princess assaulted and later mourned by which hero?
Hercules
Hercules, in the poet Silius Italicus's telling, buried Pyrene and cried her name until the peaks echoed it; Pliny the Elder dismissed the whole story as fable.
Q 06Some ancient writers traced the name Pyrenees to the Greek word for what?
Fire
Fire, pyr in Greek: Diodorus Siculus wrote that herdsmen let a blaze consume the whole range, melting its silver ore into streams that Phoenician traders bought for trifles.
Q 07Which French département is also known as Northern Catalonia?
Pyrénées-Orientales
Pyrénées-Orientales still speaks Catalan widely, and its capital Perpignan was the mainland seat of the kings of Majorca from 1276 to 1344.
Q 08Which persecuted medieval sect made its last great stand at Montségur, a hilltop fortress in the Pyrenean foothills, in 1244?
The Cathars
The Cathars held Montségur through a siege of many months; when it fell in March 1244, more than 200 who refused to renounce their faith were burned together at the foot of its hill.
Q 09Compared with the Alps, the Pyrenees are what?
Older
Older: the Pyrenees are an ancient chain pushed up a second time, mostly in the Eocene and Oligocene, before the more recent and vigorous mountain-building that shaped the Alps.
Q 10The Pyrenees rose when which body of water 'fanned out', pushing Spain against France?
The Bay of Biscay
The Bay of Biscay opened in the Cretaceous as Iberia rotated away from France; the later convergence of the two plates crumpled the sediments between them into the Pyrenees.
Q 11What rock gives the Pyrenees their massive, unworn character?
Granite
Granite resists erosion: weathering wore away the softer rock above it and left the old granite core standing along the spine of the range.
Q 12What is the local name for the mountain torrents that form the Pyrenees' waterfalls?
Gaves
Gaves is the Gascon word for the torrents of the French Pyrenees; where the two biggest, the Gave de Pau and the Gave d'Oloron, meet, the river is simply named the Gaves réunis, the united Gaves.
Q 13What is the highest waterfall in the Pyrenees?
Gavarnie
Gavarnie's Grande Cascade drops more than 400 metres down a wall of rock; it is fed by melting snow, so it runs strongest in late spring and early summer.
Q 21Which small mammal with a trunk-like snout hunts underwater in the mountain streams of the Pyrenees?
The Pyrenean desman
The Pyrenean desman, nicknamed the trumpet rat for its snout, is nearly blind and hunts by touch; its only living relative, the Russian desman, lives far away in the Volga basin.
Q 22Which Pyrenean animal was cloned after going extinct in 2000?
The ibex
The ibex of the Pyrenees, the bucardo, ended when a falling tree killed the last female, Celia; her clone died of a lung defect minutes after birth, so the animal has in effect gone extinct twice.
Q 23From which country were brown bears brought in the 1990s to revive the Pyrenean population?
Slovenia
Q 14What is a 'cirque' in Pyrenean landscape terms?
A cliff-ringed valley head
A cliff-ringed valley head, scooped out by a vanished glacier: Troumouse is about four kilometres across, and Victor Hugo called the most famous Pyrenean cirque the Colosseum of nature.
Q 15Which pass, the highest paved road in the Pyrenees, climbs above the ski town of Pas de la Casa?
Port d'Envalira
Port d'Envalira, at 2,408 m, has been the highest point of an entire Tour de France; since 2002 a toll tunnel has let drivers skip the summit altogether.
Q 16Which pass in Navarre carries the main Camino de Santiago route from France over the Pyrenees?
Roncevaux
Roncevaux is the Camino's gateway to Spain: pilgrims climb to it from Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port on the French side, though the pass itself lies wholly inside Spain.
Q 17According to legend, which of Charlemagne's paladins sliced a 40-metre-wide gap in the Pyrenean crest with his sword?
Roland
Roland, the story goes, was trying to break his sword Durendal so that no enemy could take it; the blade held and the mountain split, leaving the Brèche de Roland.
Q 18The Trimouns open pit, high in the Pyrenees near Luzenac, is one of Europe's greatest sources of what?
Talc
Talc from Trimouns, quarried at up to 1,800 m, was first carried down by donkey; the pit now yields about 400,000 tonnes a year.
Q 19Why do the western Pyrenees receive far more rain and snow than the eastern end?
Moist air off the Atlantic
Moist air off the Atlantic rides in on the prevailing westerlies and sheds its rain on the first slopes it meets, so by the time it reaches the eastern end it is markedly drier.
Q 20During the Second World War, the Comet Line smuggled whom over the Pyrenees into neutral Spain?
Downed Allied airmen
Downed Allied airmen were hidden in Brussels, taken across France by train and walked over the mountains by local guides; founder Andrée de Jongh led more than a hundred people out herself.
Slovenia supplied the bears: three were released from 1996, and one Slovenian male, Pyros, became father, grandfather or great-grandfather of nearly every cub born in the range over the next two decades.
Q 24Which vulture of the Pyrenees lives mostly on bones, dropping the big ones from a height onto rocks to crack them open?
The bearded vulture
The bearded vulture gets up to 90 per cent of its diet from bone, and its old name, ossifrage, means bone-breaker; young birds need years of practice to master the drop.
Q 25Which Spanish national park in the Pyrenees dates from 1918, making it among Spain's oldest?
Ordesa y Monte Perdido
Ordesa y Monte Perdido has been a national park since 1918; its peak is the Lost Mountain, a name said to come from the French side, where the summit hides behind a wall of other peaks.
Q 26UNESCO lists the Pyrenees' Mont Perdu massif partly as a rare survival of which traditional farming system?
Transhumance
Transhumance, the seasonal drive of herds up to summer pastures, has been kept up here for centuries; by ancestral agreement, Spanish farmers still graze their animals on the French side.
Q 27Which minority language, in its Aranese dialect, is spoken in the Aran Valley?
Occitan
Occitan, in its Gascon form called Aranese, is official here beside Catalan and Spanish, so road signs read Vielha, not Viella; across the border in France, its heartland, it has no such standing.
Q 28Photographs from the Pyrenees' Pic du Midi Observatory in 1909 helped discredit what?
Martian canals
Martian canals, championed by Percival Lowell as the irrigation works of a civilisation, simply failed to show up in the sharp photographs taken from the high, clear summit.
Q 29A NASA-backed telescope was installed at Pic du Midi in the Pyrenees in 1963 to photograph what?
The Moon
The Moon: the one-metre telescope photographed the lunar surface in fine detail in support of the Apollo landings.
Q 30What heats the research furnace at Odeillo in the French Pyrenees to thousands of degrees within seconds?
Focused sunlight
Focused sunlight: 63 mirrors track the sun onto a giant curved mirror, which concentrates the light onto a single small target; its forerunner was built nearby at Mont-Louis in 1949.