Victoria Falls Trivia
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54 free Victoria Falls trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
This Victoria Falls trivia quiz covers the largest sheet of falling water on Earth, from the geology that made it to the tourists who bungee-jump beside it. The easy questions are ones any traveller can attempt: the river, the two countries it divides, the explorer who named it after his queen, its African name and what it means. From there it moves into the numbers and the landscape: how wide and how high, the First Gorge and the Boiling Pot, the islands on the crest, the spray you can see from 50 kilometres away, the seasons that empty half the falls and the moonbows. The harder end is for geographers and Africa hands: the map that showed the falls in 1715, Livingstone Island, Emil Holub's plan, Cecil Rhodes and the bridge built to catch the spray, Sir George Darwin opening it, the 1904 hotel, Livingstone as Northern Rhodesia's capital, the fish counts above and below the falls, Devil's Pool, the Batoka Gorge dam plan and the 2019 drought that cut the flow to a century low. Every answer was checked against encyclopaedia entries on the falls, the Zambezi and the people and structures around them before publishing, and the supporting sentence is stored with each question. If you enjoy this one, try our Africa geography, world waterfalls and explorers quizzes next.
30 of 54 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01David Livingstone wrote that the river scenery above the falls 'must have been gazed upon by' whom 'in their flight'?
Angels
Angels: the line is often quoted about the falls themselves, though he wrote it of the wooded river upstream, and sightseeing flights over the falls are still sold as the Flight of Angels.
Q 02Victoria Falls joined which international list in 1989, entered under both its Lozi and English names?
UNESCO World Heritage Sites
UNESCO World Heritage Sites: one listing spans both banks under the double name Mosi-oa-Tunya / Victoria Falls, taking in national parks in Zambia and Zimbabwe, so two countries have to look after a single site.
Q 03What does Mosi-oa-Tunya, the Lozi name for Victoria Falls, mean?
The smoke that thunders
The smoke that thunders: Livingstone first saw the spray from miles upriver and wrote that its columns rose exactly like the smoke of a great African grass fire.
Q 04Which journalist found David Livingstone in 1871 and is famed for the greeting "Dr Livingstone, I presume"?
Henry Morton Stanley
Henry Morton Stanley was sent by the New York Herald and found the missing explorer, ill and short of supplies, at Ujiji in 1871, sixteen years after Livingstone had first seen the falls.
Q 05Which title does Victoria Falls usually claim?
Largest waterfall
Largest waterfall: it is neither the tallest nor the widest, but at about 1,700 metres across with a drop of up to 108 metres it forms the world's largest sheet of falling water.
Q 06Victoria Falls drops about twice as far as which other famous waterfall?
Niagara Falls
Niagara Falls: Victoria's plunge of up to 108 metres is about double Niagara's, and because its water lands in a walled-in chasm, not an open basin, the spray is forced high into the air.
Q 07After plunging into the chasm at Victoria Falls, how does the whole Zambezi get out?
Through one narrow gap
Through one narrow gap: the chasm's only exit is a cleft cut in its far wall, so a river about 1,700 metres wide is squeezed into a single gorge that zigzags away below.
Q 08What is the deep, swirling pool where the Zambezi turns sharply just below Victoria Falls called?
The Boiling Pot
The Boiling Pot is smooth at low water, but in flood it heaves with slow, enormous swirls; a steep footpath from the Zambian side leads down to it.
Q 09Which of the main streams of the curtain is the highest?
The Rainbow Falls
The streams run from the Devil's Cataract on the Zimbabwe side to the Eastern Cataract on the Zambian side.
Q 10Since the 1980s, the gorges just below Victoria Falls have been a famous venue for which adventure sport?
White-water rafting
White-water rafting: the Zambezi squeezes through the zigzag gorges in rapids graded up to 5, the hardest class that commercial rafts will run.
Q 11In which month does the Zambezi's flood usually peak at Victoria Falls?
April
April: the flood crests as the summer rains end, and at its height the spray hides so much of the falls that visitors see more of the rock face in the drier months.
Q 12Late in the dry season, which part of Victoria Falls is often reduced to bare rock?
The eastern end, in Zambia
The eastern end, in Zambia: with the river low from about September to January, up to half the rock face can stand dry, and the floor of the chasm shows along most of its length.
Q 13What rare night-time sight appears in the spray of Victoria Falls on a few evenings each month?
A moonbow
Q 21Luxury BOAC airliners flying from England to Johannesburg in 1948 stopped overnight at Victoria Falls; where did they land?
On the river itself
On the river itself: the airliners were Solent flying boats, which took four days over the trip and set down on the water above the falls so passengers could spend a night at the hotel.
Q 22Cecil Rhodes meant the bridge at Victoria Falls to carry a railway running from the Cape to which city?
Cairo
Cairo: the line was never completed, so a bridge built as one link in a railway spanning all of Africa ended up joining just two neighbours.
Q 23Cecil Rhodes insisted the Victoria Falls Bridge be built at what kind of spot?
A moonbow: around full moon the light is strong enough to raise a rainbow in the spray, but it is too faint to stir the eye's colour receptors, so the arc usually looks white.
Q 14Pictures of Victoria Falls slowed to a trickle in late 2019 were widely reported as a warning about what?
Climate change
Climate change: a severe drought had cut the flow far below normal, though the falls also shrink to a fraction of their flood size in every dry season.
Q 15David Livingstone planted peach stones and coffee beside the falls in 1855; which animals did he fear would wreck his garden?
Hippos
Hippos: he had seen their footprints and named them as his one fear for it, and he was right, because the plot he hoped would be the parent of all the country's gardens was soon trampled flat.
Q 16What rock does the Zambezi cut through at Victoria Falls?
Basalt
Basalt: the old lava flows are riddled with long cracks, and the river scours them out one after another, leaving each abandoned line of the falls as another zigzag gorge.
Q 17Before it drained east through the Batoka Gorge, the Upper Zambezi originally flowed south to join which river?
The Limpopo
The Limpopo: uplift across the Kalahari cut that route and left the upper river draining into an inland basin, until the lower Zambezi captured it and sent it east over the falls.
Q 18What did David Livingstone do at the falls for the only time on his travels, calling it a 'piece of vanity'?
Carved his initials
Carved his initials: he cut D.L. and the date 1855 into a tree, and later visitors, his own brother among them, added theirs.
Q 19In 1910 the world professional title in which sport was contested on the Zambezi just above Victoria Falls?
Rowing
Rowing: the region's administrators paid to stage the world sculling title race there to advertise the falls, and New Zealand's Richard Arnst beat England's Ernest Barry.
Q 20What killed so many settlers at the Old Drift, the riverside outpost above Victoria Falls, in the early 1900s?
Fever
Fever: the camp sat beside mosquito breeding grounds and malaria kept killing its settlers, so a new town, Livingstone, was laid out on higher ground, and the 1905 bridge made the old crossing redundant as well.
One where trains would catch the spray
One where trains would catch the spray: Rhodes chose it in London from sketches and travellers' accounts, having never seen the falls, and he died three years before the bridge opened.
Q 24How did engineers get the first line across the gorge when work on the Victoria Falls Bridge began?
By rocket
By rocket: it carried a light cord to men waiting on the far cliff, the cord pulled over a wire, the wire a rope, and the rope the heavy cable that would ferry the bridge parts across.
Q 25The Victoria Falls Bridge was opened in 1905 by George, the scientist son of which famous Victorian?
Charles Darwin
Charles Darwin: his son George, an astronomer who studied the tides, opened it as president of the British Association during the Association's 1905 visit to the falls.
Q 26Ralph Freeman, who checked the stresses for the Victoria Falls Bridge, later did the detailed design of which landmark?
Sydney Harbour Bridge
Sydney Harbour Bridge: the Zambezi arch was built out from both banks until the halves met in mid-air, and Freeman's far larger Sydney arch went up the same way.
Q 27The Victoria Falls Bridge's two halves overlapped by an inch at first; what made them fit by morning?
The steel shrank as it cooled
The steel shrank as it cooled: a day of African sun had stretched the arch by an inch and a quarter, and by the next sunrise it had drawn back enough for the ends to meet exactly.
Q 28What do thrill-seekers do from the Victoria Falls Bridge, dropping 111 metres towards the Zambezi?
Bungee jump
Bungee jump: the leap from the century-old railway bridge helped turn the falls from a sedate sightseeing stop into a town with a reputation as the adrenalin capital of Africa.
Q 29The 'Blondin' cableway that carried Victoria Falls Bridge parts across the gorge was named after a famous what?
Tightrope walker
Tightrope walker: Charles Blondin was the great Victorian daredevil of the high wire, and the cableway named after him swung a whole locomotive across in pieces before the bridge existed.
Q 30The Zambian town of Livingstone, beside the falls, held what role from 1911 to 1935?
Capital of Northern Rhodesia
Capital of Northern Rhodesia: the colonial government decided the town lay too far south and built a new capital at more central Lusaka, which took over in 1935.