Sahara Trivia
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58 free Sahara trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Sep 2026.
The Sahara covers about 9.2 million square kilometres of North Africa, nearly a third of the continent, and it is the largest hot desert in the world. This quiz starts with the geography everyone half-remembers (which seas it touches, what the Sahel is, where the highest peak stands) and moves on to the numbers that make the place extraordinary: 4,300 hours of sunshine a year, sand at 83 °C, a mean annual rainfall of half a millimetre, and two recorded snowfalls in a single Algerian town. From there it heads into the desert's past and its people: the 20,000-year cycle that turns the Sahara green, the Stone Age graveyard found by a dinosaur hunter, a child mummy older than any in Egypt, the Garamantes who tapped fossil water until it ran out, the caravans of Ibn Battuta and Mansa Musa's Timbuktu, French bus services across the sand, and the lone tree flattened by a truck. Wildlife gets its due too, from the fennec fox and addax to the fastest ant on Earth. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on the Sahara and its landmarks, and each question shows the sentence that supports it. Try our deserts, Egypt and Africa quizzes next.
30 of 58 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01The Sahara is the largest hot desert, but which continent holds the biggest desert of all?
Antarctica
Antarctica: a desert is defined by how little precipitation falls, not by heat, so the frozen continent's 14 million square kilometres count, about half as big again as the Sahara.
Q 02The name Sahara is a broken plural of a word from which language?
Arabic
Arabic: sahra means 'desert' and sahara is its plural, so 'Sahara Desert' literally says 'deserts desert'.
Q 03The Sahara stretches from the Atlantic in the west to which sea in the east?
Red Sea
Red Sea: in the desert mountains behind its Egyptian shore, Roman crews quarried giant granite columns that still hold up the porch of the Pantheon in Rome.
Q 04What is the name of the belt of semi-arid savanna that bounds the Sahara to the south?
The Sahel
The Sahel: in the 2000s African nations launched a 'Great Green Wall' of trees across it to hold back the desert.
Q 05The Sahara covers about as much land as which country?
United States
United States: the Sahara matches it for size, yet it holds fewer than one person per square mile and huge areas are wholly empty.
Q 06In Saharan geography, what is a hamada?
A rocky plateau
A rocky plateau: wind has carried off the sand and dust and left bare rock, and that kind of stony ground covers far more of the Sahara than sand does.
Q 07Which Saharan country stood in for the desert planet Tatooine in Star Wars?
Tunisia
Tunisia: George Lucas filmed there and borrowed the planet's name from the southern Tunisian town of Tataouine.
Q 08The Tibesti Mountains, home to the Sahara's highest peak, rise mainly in the north of which country?
Chad
Chad: deep dry river valleys cut into the range show that the heart of the desert once had a far wetter climate.
Q 09Emi Koussi, the highest mountain in the Sahara, is what kind of peak?
A shield volcano
A shield volcano: planetary scientists have used it as a close stand-in for Elysium Mons, a giant volcano on Mars.
Q 10The Richat Structure, nicknamed the Eye of the Sahara, became a famous landmark for whom?
Astronauts
Astronauts: crews have picked out its bull's-eye rings from orbit since the earliest space missions, because little else breaks up that featureless stretch of desert.
Q 11What kind of geological feature is the Richat Structure?
An eroded dome
An eroded dome: its bull's-eye rings were first put down to a meteorite strike, but they are layers of uplifted rock that erosion has planed flat.
Q 12In 1942 the impassable Qattara Depression anchored the desert line that stopped Rommel at which battle?
El Alamein
El Alamein: with the sea to the north and the depression's marshes and cliffs barring tanks to the south, the British line could not be outflanked.
Q 13Which hot wind blows from the Sahara across the Mediterranean into southern Europe?
Sirocco
Sirocco: it leaves North Africa hot, dry and thick with dust, then soaks up moisture over the sea and reaches Europe's coast warm and damp.
Q 21Botanists mark the northern limit of the Sahara by the northern limit of cultivation of which crop?
Date palm
Date palm: in every Saharan oasis it is the staple food, and gardeners raise their fruit, vegetables and grain in its shade.
Q 22What drives the Sahara's roughly 20,000-year swing between desert and savanna?
Earth's axial precession
Earth's axial precession: the planet's axis wobbles like a spinning top, which shifts the North African monsoon and switches the rains on and off.
Q 23Which conqueror trekked deep into the Sahara to consult the oracle at the Siwa oasis?
Alexander the Great
Q 14When a 1922 North African reading of 58 °C was scrapped in 2012, which place regained the world heat record?
Death Valley
Death Valley: its 56.7 °C from 1913 became the record again after investigators decided the North African figure most likely came from an inexperienced observer misreading the instrument.
Q 15A valley in Egypt's Sahara is famous for the fossil skeletons of which sea animals?
Whales
Whales: Wadi al-Hitan, the Valley of the Whales, holds skeletons of early species that were still in the last stages of losing their hind legs.
Q 16Why do Saharan nights turn so cold after scorching days?
Dry air
Dry air: with almost no water vapour or cloud overhead, the day's warmth escapes straight back to space, and winter nights can dip below freezing.
Q 17The Cave of Swimmers, a real Saharan site, is a key setting in which Best Picture winner?
The English Patient
The English Patient: the explorer at the heart of the film really did find the cave, and argued that its swimming figures showed the bone-dry desert around it had once held water.
Q 18Sahara snow was recorded in 1979 and 2016 at the town of Ain Sefra, in which country?
Algeria
Algeria: Ain Sefra sits more than 1,000 metres up among the Atlas Mountains, and its 1979 snowstorm lasted just half an hour.
Q 19Which classic book opens with a pilot crash-landing in the Sahara?
The Little Prince
The Little Prince: its author, the airman Antoine de Saint-Exupery, really was stranded in the Sahara after a crash in the 1930s and spun the ordeal into the tale.
Q 20The pressure ridge over the Sahara is the eastern extension of which Atlantic system?
Azores High
Azores High: when the same system drifts west in summer it is renamed the Bermuda High and brings muggy heat to the far side of the Atlantic.
Alexander the Great: having just taken Egypt, he crossed the desert to the oracle of Amun, whose priests were said to have hailed him as the god's son.
Q 24The Dakar Rally, long raced across the Sahara, moved to which continent in 2009?
South America
South America: organisers scrapped the 2008 race over terrorist threats in Africa, and the rally kept the name of the Senegalese finish line it had left behind.
Q 25Fog from which cool ocean current waters the lichens and succulents of the Atlantic coastal desert?
Canary
Canary: the cold current chills the air enough to choke off rainfall along that shore, yet the same chill leaves it wrapped in humid air and fog.
Q 26The Tanezrouft, one of the Sahara's driest and most lifeless regions, is what kind of terrain?
A flat gravel plain
A flat gravel plain: with no water and no landmarks it was long shunned by caravans, yet its firm, level surface suits motor vehicles and now carries a road.
Q 27Which dry, dusty wind blows off the Sahara across West Africa every winter?
Harmattan
Harmattan: for all the dust it carries, West Africans nicknamed it 'the doctor', because its dry air comes as a relief after months of sticky tropical heat.
Q 28The fennec fox's most distinctive feature is what?
Its very large ears
Its very large ears: on the smallest of all foxes, they shed heat and pick up the sound of prey moving under the sand.
Q 29The addax, a Saharan animal that almost never needs to drink, is also known as what?
The white antelope
The white antelope: it gets nearly all the water it needs from the plants it eats and the dew on them, and its spiral horns earn it a second name, the screwhorn.
Q 30Which big cat has a rare, pale Saharan form that is active mostly at night?
Cheetah
Cheetah: camera traps show the desert cats moving mainly after dark to dodge the heat, at some of the lowest densities ever recorded for a large African carnivore.