50 free South America trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
44 free South America trivia questions with answers. South America is a continent of superlatives, and this quiz leans into them: the river that carries a fifth of the world's freshwater to the sea and has never been bridged, the tallest waterfall, the driest desert, the highest capital city, the biggest salt flat, the longest mountain range. Around a third of the questions are about the Amazon alone, from the trees and insects it holds to the Saharan dust that fertilises it and the conquistador who gave it a name from Greek myth. The rest ranges across all twelve countries: capitals and languages (why one country speaks Dutch and another Guarani), history from the Inca to Bolívar, wildlife from capybaras to anacondas, and culture from tango and Carnival to the first World Cup. Easy openers for a geography class sit beside questions that will slow down a seasoned traveller. Every answer has been checked against a primary source, and the citation sits under each explanation.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01How many sovereign countries are there in South America?
12
Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Guyana, Paraguay, Peru, Suriname, Uruguay and Venezuela. French Guiana is part of France, not a country.
Q 02The Amazon River carries roughly what share of all the river water flowing into the world's oceans?
One-fifth
Its average discharge is about 223,700 cubic metres per second, more than the next seven largest rivers combined.
Q 03The Amazon rainforest gets its name from Francisco de Orellana, who borrowed it from what?
The female warriors of Greek myth
His expedition reported being attacked by women warriors on the river in 1542. Whether they were women or long-haired men is still argued.
Q 04What percentage of the Amazon rainforest lies within Brazil?
About 60%
The forest spans nine nations in all. Peru has the next biggest share, followed by Colombia.
Q 05The Amazon rainforest spans the territory of how many nations?
Nine
Brazil, Peru, Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador, Bolivia, Guyana, Suriname and French Guiana. It represents over half of all the rainforest left on Earth.
Q 06Roughly how many individual trees are estimated to stand in the Amazon rainforest?
390 billion
They belong to about 16,000 species, though just a few hundred 'hyperdominant' species make up half the trees.
Q 07Over half the dust fertilising the Amazon comes from one depression in which desert?
The Sahara
The Bodélé depression in northern Chad is the dried bed of an ancient lake, and its phosphorus-rich dust crosses the Atlantic every year.
Q 08About how many insect species live in the Amazon rainforest?
2.5 million
That is one region holding a large fraction of every insect species on the planet, most of them not yet described by science.
Q 09Which is the largest city in the Amazon basin?
Manaus
It sits where the dark Rio Negro meets the sandy Solimões, and the two rivers run side by side unmixed for kilometres. Its opera house was built with rubber money in 1896.
Q 10The Amazon represents roughly what share of the rainforest remaining on Earth?
Over half
The basin covers about 5.5 million square kilometres, and around 60 indigenous groups within it remain largely isolated from the outside world.
Q 11The Amazon River rises in the Andes of which country?
Peru
The most distant source is usually placed on Nevado Mismi. The river then crosses the whole width of the continent to reach the Atlantic in Brazil.
Q 12The Andes stretch about 8,900 km along the continent's west coast, making them what?
The longest continental mountain range in the world
They run through seven countries and hold the world's highest volcanoes, including Ojos del Salado at 6,893 metres on the Chile-Argentina border.
Q 13Aconcagua, the highest mountain in the Americas, is in which country?
Argentina
Q 21Easter Island, home to nearly 1,000 moai statues, has belonged to which country since 1888?
Chile
The Dutch navigator Jacob Roggeveen named it on Easter Sunday 1722. The nearest inhabited land is Pitcairn Island, more than 2,000 km away.
Q 22The Salar de Uyuni in Bolivia is the largest of what in the world?
Salt flat
It covers about 10,582 square kilometres and turns into a giant mirror after rain. Most of Bolivia's lithium, around a fifth of the world's known resources, lies beneath it.
Q 23The Iguazu Falls, the world's largest waterfall system, sit on the border between which two countries?
Argentina and Brazil
It rises to about 6,961 metres in Mendoza Province and is the highest peak anywhere outside Asia. A Swiss guide, Matthias Zurbriggen, made the first recorded ascent in 1897.
Q 14Angel Falls, the world's tallest uninterrupted waterfall at 979 metres, is in which country?
Venezuela
It plunges off the Auyán-tepui table mountain in Canaima National Park and is named after Jimmie Angel, an American pilot who crash-landed on top in 1937.
Q 15What else has the lifeless soil of Chile's Atacama Desert been used for?
Testing instruments for Mars missions
In 2003 researchers repeated the Viking landers' life-detection tests on Atacama soil and found nothing. Some weather stations there have never recorded rain.
Q 16Lake Titicaca, often called the world's highest navigable lake, sits on the border of which two countries?
Bolivia and Peru
At 3,812 metres it is also South America's largest lake by both area and volume. The Uros people live on floating islands built from layers of totora reed.
Q 17The Uros people of Lake Titicaca live on floating islands made from what?
Layers of totora reed
The buoyant sedge rots from below and has to be topped up constantly, so the islands are rebuilt continuously.
Q 18Machu Picchu is believed to have been built around 1450 as an estate for which Inca emperor?
Pachacuti
The site was brought to world attention by Hiram Bingham in 1911 while he was hunting for a different lost city. Its walls are dry stone, fitted without mortar.
Q 19The Galápagos Islands, which Darwin visited aboard HMS Beagle in 1835, belong to which country?
Ecuador
They lie about 1,000 km west of the mainland and take their name from the Spanish word for the giant tortoises that live there.
Q 20The Galápagos Islands are named after which animal?
The giant tortoise
'Galápago' comes from an old Iberian word for turtle. The archipelago was one of the very first UNESCO World Heritage Sites, inscribed in 1978.
About half the river's flow crashes into the Devil's Throat. The name is Guarani for 'big water', and Eleanor Roosevelt's reported reaction was 'Poor Niagara!'
Q 24Simón Bolívar, 'El Libertador', was born in 1783 in which city?
Caracas
He led what are now Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Panama and Bolivia to independence from Spain, and two of those countries are named after him. He died of tuberculosis in 1830.
Q 25Which is the only independent country outside Europe where Dutch is the official language?
Suriname
It gained independence from the Netherlands in 1975 and is South America's smallest country by both area and population. About 90% of it is forest, the highest share of any nation.
Q 26Which is the only country in mainland South America with English as its official language?
Guyana
Its name comes from an Amerindian phrase meaning 'land of many waters'. Since oil was found offshore in 2015 it has had one of the fastest-growing economies on Earth.
Q 27In which South American country do over 90% of people speak Guarani alongside Spanish?
Paraguay
It is one of the continent's two landlocked countries (Bolivia is the other) and co-owns the Itaipu Dam with Brazil, one of the world's biggest hydroelectric plants.
Q 28Which South American country's national flag is unique in having a different design on each side?
Paraguay
The front shows the national coat of arms and the back the seal of the treasury, a lion under a red cap with the words 'Paz y Justicia'.
Q 29Brasília, Brazil's purpose-built capital, was inaugurated in which year?
1960
It went up in 41 months to a plan by Lúcio Costa, often likened to an aeroplane or a bird, with Oscar Niemeyer designing the main buildings. UNESCO listed it in 1987.
Q 30At roughly 3,650 metres, which city is the highest administrative capital in the world?
La Paz
Bolivia's constitutional capital is actually Sucre. La Paz also runs the world's largest urban cable-car network beneath the snow peaks of Illimani.