Suriname Trivia
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49 free Suriname trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Sep 2026.
Suriname is the smallest country in South America, the only one where Dutch is the official language, and the one the Dutch kept when they let England have New York. This quiz covers the lot: the English colony of the 1650s, the Treaty of Breda, the sugar plantations and the 300,000 enslaved Africans, the Maroons who fought their way to freedom in the interior, indentured workers from India and Java, independence in 1975, Dési Bouterse's coup and the December murders. Easy questions ask for the capital, the language, the neighbours and the continent's newest oil player; the harder ones want the highest mountain, the meaning of 'Ketikoti', the year the English spelling changed, the reservoir that covers 1% of the country and the swimmer who won an Olympic gold in Seoul. There is also Sranan Tongo, the wooden cathedral, the mosque next door to a synagogue, the flag's yellow star and the Dutch football stars with Surinamese roots. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on the country, its capital and its history, and each question carries the sentence that backs it up.
30 of 49 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which ocean does Suriname's coast face?
Atlantic Ocean
The Atlantic Ocean is still building this coast: its currents carry mud westward from the mouth of the Amazon and lay it down as shifting banks along Suriname's shore.
Q 02What is the capital and largest city of Suriname?
Paramaribo
Paramaribo lost hundreds of buildings to a great fire in January 1821, yet its original street plan survived the rebuilding and remains intact in today's World Heritage inner city.
Q 03Suriname is the smallest country by area and population on which continent?
South America
South America's smallest independent country is about the size of Tunisia, yet Tunisia holds some twelve million people and Suriname well under one million.
Q 04Which two neighbours lie to Suriname's east and west?
French Guiana and Guyana
French Guiana and Guyana both have unsettled borders with Suriname, disputes over the upper reaches of the boundary rivers that date from colonial rule.
Q 05Under the 1667 Treaty of Breda, the Dutch kept Suriname and let their rivals keep which settlement?
New Amsterdam
New Amsterdam had fallen in 1664 and already been renamed New York, and the peace let both sides keep their wartime captures rather than hand them back.
Q 06Who represented the Dutch queen at Suriname's 1975 independence ceremony?
Princess Beatrix
Princess Beatrix stood in for her mother at the celebrations in the capital, while the queen herself stayed in The Hague and signed the act that made Suriname independent that same day.
Q 07More than nine-tenths of Suriname's land is covered by what?
Rainforest
Rainforest survives on this scale because nearly all Surinamese live on the narrow coastal plain, leaving the southern four-fifths of the country almost untouched.
Q 08Which language serves as Suriname's everyday lingua franca among its many ethnic groups?
Sranan Tongo
Sranan Tongo even has its own verse of the national anthem: the first is sung in Dutch, the second in Sranan, written in 1959 by the poet Trefossa.
Q 09Suriname has the highest proportion in the Americas of followers of which religion?
Islam
Islam split Suriname's Javanese community over a compass point: some kept praying toward the west, as their forebears had in Java, while others turned east, where Mecca really lies from Suriname.
Q 10In the centre of the capital, a synagogue stands directly beside what other building?
A mosque
A mosque stands right beside the Neveh Shalom synagogue on Keizerstraat, and the two congregations share a car park, a pairing often held up as a symbol of Suriname's religious peace.
Q 11At the 2012 census, Suriname's largest ethnic group descended from indentured labourers from which country?
India
India supplied the contract workers recruited to replace freed slaves on the plantations; their descendants, known locally as Hindustanis, were more than a quarter of the population.
Q 12What are the descendants of enslaved Africans who escaped into Suriname's interior called?
Maroons
Maroons fought the Dutch to a standstill: the Ndyuka won a peace treaty recognising their freedom in 1760, a full century before slavery ended in the colony.
Q 13Who was compensated when Suriname's slavery ended in 1863?
The owners
The owners were paid by the Dutch state for every person freed, while the freed themselves were bound to ten more years of contract labour under state supervision.
Q 21What is Suriname's highest mountain?
Julianatop
Julianatop stands in the Wilhelmina Mountains, so both the country's highest peak and the range around it carry the names of Dutch queens, a daughter and her mother.
Q 22As the Brokopondo Reservoir filled in the 1960s, what did Operation Gwamba rescue?
Wild animals
Wild animals trapped on shrinking islands were caught and released on dry ground: 9,737 of them by the count of the Massachusetts SPCA, which calls it the largest rescue of its kind.
Q 23Which ore, mined by Alcoa from 1916 until 2015, dominated Suriname's 20th-century economy?
Bauxite
Bauxite from Suriname met well over half of America's wartime need for aircraft aluminium, which is why US troops were stationed there from late 1941.
Q 14Which US president's administration opened talks with the Dutch about resettling freed African Americans in Suriname?
Abraham Lincoln
Abraham Lincoln's minister in The Hague negotiated a resettlement treaty with the Dutch government, but the Senate never ratified it and nothing came of the plan.
Q 15Which army sergeant led the 1980 coup and later served as elected president from 2010 to 2020?
Dési Bouterse
Dési Bouterse was convicted in 2019 of the 1982 December murders and given 20 years, but he never reported to prison and died a fugitive in December 2024.
Q 16The 1982 'December murders' of 15 regime critics took place at which landmark in the capital?
Fort Zeelandia
Fort Zeelandia is the 17th-century fort from which the old town's street grid was laid out; the arrested critics were taken there, tortured and shot.
Q 17In 1990 the army chief dismissed the civilian government in an episode popularly known as what?
The Telephone Coup
The Telephone Coup was bloodless: on 24 December 1990 the army leadership reportedly just rang President Shankar to tell him that his government was finished.
Q 18In which event did Suriname's Anthony Nesty take swimming gold in Seoul in 1988?
100m butterfly
The 100m butterfly final saw Nesty touch out the American favourite Matt Biondi by one hundredth of a second, winning Suriname's first Olympic medal.
Q 19Which of these Dutch football greats has a Surinamese father?
Ruud Gullit
Ruud Gullit's father George came to Amsterdam from Suriname; in 1987 his son dedicated his player-of-the-year award to the then-imprisoned Nelson Mandela.
Q 20Suriname's flag has green, white and red bands with what in the centre?
A yellow star
A yellow star sits on the central red band and stands for the unity of the country's many ethnic groups; the design came out of a national competition held before independence.
Q 24Which product was Suriname's biggest export earner in the early 2020s?
Gold
Gold comes both from multinational mines and from small-scale miners in the interior, who produce a large share of it and whose mercury has polluted the inland rivers.
Q 25What is Suriname's national oil company called?
Staatsolie
Staatsolie dates its story from an accident: in 1965 a crew drilling for drinking water in a village schoolyard struck oil instead.
Q 26What has been Suriname's currency since 2004?
The Surinamese dollar
The Surinamese dollar replaced the guilder on 1 January 2004 at one new dollar to 1,000 old guilders, wiping three zeros off every price overnight.
Q 27How does the Surinam toad raise its young?
Eggs develop in pockets on the mother's back
Eggs develop in pockets on the mother's back, sealed under a layer of skin, and the young never swim free as tadpoles, bursting out as fully formed little toads.
Q 28Colonists from which country planted Suriname's first lasting European settlement around 1650?
England
England held it for under two decades: Lord Willoughby, governor of Barbados, sent the planters over, and a Dutch fleet seized the colony in 1667.
Q 29Which community founded the 17th-century plantation settlement on the Suriname River that became a World Heritage Site in 2023?
Sephardic Jews
Sephardic Jews were planters the colony's rulers badly wanted to keep, so the settlers of Jodensavanne were granted freedom of worship and a court of their own.
Q 30In which 18th-century tale does a maimed slave in Surinam name the price of sugar?
Candide
Candide reaches Dutch Surinam and meets a man who lost a hand to the sugar mill and a leg for running away: 'This is the price at which you eat sugar in Europe.'