Strait of Gibraltar Trivia
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60 free Strait of Gibraltar trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
The Strait of Gibraltar is 14 kilometres wide, up to 900 metres deep, and has been the hinge between Europe and Africa since a flood refilled the Mediterranean five million years ago. This quiz covers the geography and the science first: the narrowest point, the Camarinal Sill, the two-way flow of Atlantic and Mediterranean water, the Messinian salinity crisis and the Zanclean flood, the internal waves visible from space, the resident orcas and the seabird migrations, and the Neanderthals who held out on the Rock. Then the people: the Pillars of Hercules and Ne plus ultra, Tariq ibn Ziyad's landing in 711 and the mountain named for him, the Anglo-Dutch capture of Gibraltar in 1704 and the Treaty of Utrecht, the Great Siege, Trafalgar, Churchill and the macaques, Ceuta and Tarifa, the U-boats that drifted through in silence, the Atlantropa dam scheme, the swimmer who crossed first, and the Spain-Morocco tunnel talked about since 1979. Easy questions ask which continents it separates; the expert tier asks for depths, dates and Latin names. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on the Strait of Gibraltar, Gibraltar, the Rock, the Pillars of Hercules, Ceuta, Tarifa and related pages, and the supporting sentence is attached to each question. If you like this, try our quizzes on Gibraltar, Morocco and the Mediterranean.
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Q 01The Strait of Gibraltar links the Mediterranean Sea to which other body of water?
The Atlantic
The Atlantic is the only ocean the Mediterranean opens onto: its other natural outlet runs through the Bosporus to the Black Sea, which has no further way out to the open ocean.
Q 02How wide is the Strait of Gibraltar at its narrowest point?
About 14 km
About 14 km at the narrowest point, which leaves Africa far closer to Europe than England is to France: the Strait of Dover is more than twice as wide.
Q 03Which Spanish port city faces the Rock of Gibraltar from the opposite shore of its bay?
Algeciras
Algeciras sits across the water from the Rock, and Spaniards name the bay after their own port instead of after Gibraltar; ferries for Morocco sail from its harbour.
Q 04Which Moroccan port on the Strait of Gibraltar was run as an international zone by foreign powers until 1956?
Tangier
Tangier was governed jointly by European powers from the 1920s, which made it a magnet for diplomats, spies and writers, and it rejoined Morocco only in 1956.
Q 05The name Gibraltar comes from an Arabic phrase meaning what?
Tariq's Mount
Tariq's Mount, Jabal Tariq in Arabic, honours the Muslim commander who landed at the Rock early in the 8th century; over time the phrase was worn down to 'Gibraltar'.
Q 06Which Beatle married in Gibraltar in 1969 and then turned the trip into a hit single?
John Lennon
John Lennon. He married Yoko Ono in Gibraltar on 20 March 1969 and told the story in The Ballad of John and Yoko, which he and Paul McCartney recorded without the other two Beatles.
Q 07Which legendary island did Plato place just beyond the Pillars of Hercules?
Atlantis
Atlantis. In Plato's story its armies overran much of the Mediterranean until Athens defeated them, and then the island sank into the sea in a single day and night.
Q 08The Romans named the strait Fretum Gaditanum after Gades, which Spanish port today?
Cadiz
Cadiz. The Roman name Gades never quite died out: people from Cadiz are still called gaditanos.
Q 09Which 1805 naval battle was fought off a Spanish cape just outside the strait's western entrance?
Trafalgar
Trafalgar. Nelson's flagship Victory was so badly damaged that she had to be towed into Gibraltar for repairs, then sailed for England with the dead admiral's body on board.
Q 10What did the Romans call the Rock of Gibraltar?
Mons Calpe
Mons Calpe. Its twin on the African shore was Abila, and Pliny recorded the local belief that Hercules had dug through between the two and let the ocean in.
Q 11Which ghost ship, found drifting without her crew in 1872, was sailed to Gibraltar for a salvage hearing?
Mary Celeste
Mary Celeste. Gibraltar's attorney general suspected a crime, and though the court found no evidence of one, the men who brought her in were paid only a fraction of what the ship and her cargo were worth.
Q 12Which of the labours of Hercules took him to the western limit of the world at the strait?
Fetching the cattle of Geryon
Fetching the cattle of Geryon. In Apollodorus's telling, Hercules aimed his bow at the scorching Sun on the way, and the god admired his nerve so much that he lent him a golden cup to sail in.
Q 13An ancient Greek historian wrote that Hercules narrowed the strait to keep what out of the Mediterranean?
Q 21At its peak, the flood that refilled the Mediterranean through the strait carried hundreds of times the flow of which river?
The Amazon
The Amazon. One study put the peak flow at about 100 million cubic metres a second, enough to raise the level of the sea by more than ten metres a day.
Q 22If the strait closed today, how long would it take most of the Mediterranean to dry up?
About a thousand years
About a thousand years. That is how quickly the basin is thought to have emptied when it was last cut off, and the lost water raised sea levels across the rest of the world.
Q 23Why does the strait's net flow run eastwards, into the Mediterranean?
Sea monsters
Sea monsters. Diodorus Siculus added that other writers told the opposite story, in which the two continents were once joined and Hercules cut the channel between them.
Q 14What Latin warning was said to be inscribed on the pillars flanking the strait?
Ne plus ultra
Ne plus ultra. It means 'nothing further beyond', and Spain later turned it on its head: Charles V took Plus ultra, 'further beyond', as his motto, and it is still on the Spanish coat of arms.
Q 15Which American insurance giant has long used the Rock of Gibraltar as its symbol?
Prudential
Prudential. It adopted the Rock as a picture of strength in the 1890s, and for decades its adverts offered Americans 'a piece of the Rock'.
Q 16The Rock of Gibraltar is made mainly of what type of rock?
Limestone
Limestone. Rainwater slowly dissolves it, which is why the Rock is riddled with caves, and the biggest chamber of St Michael's Cave is now used as a concert hall.
Q 17Which animals on the Rock of Gibraltar are Europe's only wild monkeys?
Barbary macaques
Barbary macaques. Their ancestors are thought to have been brought over from the mountains of Morocco and Algeria, and for decades the British Army was responsible for the Rock's troops.
Q 18During the Second World War, who ordered Gibraltar's dwindling monkeys restocked, heeding a legend that Britain would lose the Rock without them?
Winston Churchill
Winston Churchill. Told that only a handful of the Rock's monkeys were left, he had fresh animals brought over from North Africa to keep the colony going.
Q 19What do geologists call the time, about six million years ago, when the Mediterranean was cut off and largely dried up?
The Messinian salinity crisis
The Messinian salinity crisis. As the water level fell, rivers carved canyons down into the emptying basin, and the old gorge of the Nile still lies buried deep beneath Egypt.
Q 20The ocean refilled the Mediterranean through the strait about 5.33 million years ago in what event?
The Zanclean flood
The Zanclean flood. It may have begun as a trickle lasting thousands of years, but about nine-tenths of the water is thought to have poured in within a few months to two years.
Evaporation there exceeds river inflow plus rainfall
Evaporation there exceeds river inflow plus rainfall. Without the top-up the sea would shrink, while saltier, heavier Mediterranean water slides out underneath in the opposite direction.
Q 24Which prized fish swims through the strait each year to spawn in the Mediterranean, where net traps have caught it since antiquity?
Bluefin tuna
Bluefin tuna. Fishermen on the strait's Spanish shore still trap them in the almadraba, a maze of nets, and the nearby Roman town of Baelo Claudia grew rich salting the catch.
Q 25Which British aircraft carrier was sunk off Gibraltar in 1941 by a U-boat that had just slipped through the strait?
HMS Ark Royal
HMS Ark Royal. The carrier known as a 'lucky ship' was hit by a single torpedo from U-81 and sank the next day under tow, but all except one of her crew of nearly 1,500 were saved.
Q 26Which German admiral was reluctant to send U-boats through the strait, judging each one lost for good?
Karl Dönitz
Karl Dönitz. The U-boat chief's fear proved right: about 60 boats got in from 1941 onwards, and not one of them ever made it back out through the strait.
Q 27Since 2020, which animals have been ramming sailboats and breaking their rudders around the strait?
Killer whales
Killer whales. A local population of only a few dozen has gone for hundreds of boats and sunk several, and the habit appears to spread as one animal copies another.
Q 28Migrating storks and eagles funnel across the strait because the open sea lacks what?
Rising air
Rising air. Big soaring birds circle up on columns of warm air to gain height without flapping, and because these barely form over water they cross where the sea is narrowest.
Q 29The Rock of Gibraltar may have been one of the last refuges of which extinct humans?
Neanderthals
Neanderthals. A Neanderthal skull was dug out of a Gibraltar quarry in 1848, eight years before the German find that gave the species its name, but nobody realised what it was.
Q 30Which American general ran Operation Torch, the 1942 invasion of North Africa, from a headquarters tunnelled inside the Rock of Gibraltar?
Dwight D. Eisenhower
Dwight D. Eisenhower. He flew in three days before the landings and directed them from a small chamber in the Rock's wartime tunnels, a decade before he became US president.