Identify the Landmark Quiz — 10 Free Questions

Question 1

This moated medieval fortress stands on the north bank of the Thames in the English capital. William the Conqueror began it in the 1070s around a tall square keep of pale stone. Over the centuries it has served as a royal palace, a prison, a place of execution, an arsenal, a mint and even a zoo, and it still guards the Crown Jewels.

Question 2

This octagonal Islamic shrine, with a brilliant gold roof and walls of blue and green tiles, stands on a raised platform in the Old City of Jerusalem. Finished in 691, it is one of the earliest surviving works of Islamic architecture. It is built over a slab of bedrock holy to Jews, Christians and Muslims.

Question 3

This pale, many-towered hilltop castle in the Bavarian Alps of southern Germany looks medieval but was built in the 1800s for a shy, dreamy king who loved the operas of Richard Wagner. He lived in it for only a few months before his mysterious death, and it was opened to the public weeks later.

Question 4

This clock tower rises about 96 metres at the north end of a parliament building beside a river in a European capital. The name that everyone uses for the tower actually belongs to the largest bell inside it, which weighs over 13 tonnes and has a famous deep bong.

Question 5

This is the longest structure ever built by people, a chain of walls, watchtowers and forts running for thousands of kilometres across northern East Asia. It was raised and rebuilt over many centuries to keep out horse-riding raiders from the steppe. Most of what tourists see today dates from the Ming dynasty.

Question 6

This vast walled complex of nearly 1,000 low buildings with golden roofs sits at the very centre of Beijing, ringed by a wide moat. It was the home and court of Chinese emperors for almost 500 years, and ordinary people were not allowed inside, which is where its name comes from.

Question 7

This sprawling hilltop palace-and-fortress complex was built by Muslim rulers in Granada, in southern Spain, mostly in the 1200s and 1300s. Behind plain reddish outer walls lie delicate courtyards with fountains and pools, and rooms covered in lace-like carved plaster and coloured tiles.

Question 8

This dramatic fiord lies in the far south-west of New Zealand, where dark forested cliffs and a sharp pyramid-shaped peak drop straight into deep, near-black water. Dozens of waterfalls pour down the rock faces, especially after rain, and the area gets over 6 metres of rainfall a year.

Question 9

This massive stone triumphal arch stands at the western end of the Champs-Elysees in Paris, at the centre of a star of twelve radiating avenues. Ordered by Napoleon in 1806 to honour his armies, it was finished only in 1836, long after his fall. An eternal flame burns beneath it.

Question 10

Nearly 900 of these giant carved stone figures, with heavy brows, long noses and no legs, stand on a small, extremely remote volcanic land in the Pacific Ocean, now part of Chile. They were cut from soft rock in a quarry and somehow moved several kilometres, possibly 'walked' upright with ropes.

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About Identify the Landmark

Can you name the place? Each question shows a photograph of a famous landmark -- a building, a monument, a ruin or a rock -- and gives three short, easy sentences about it: roughly where it is, when and why it was built, and what it looks like, without ever saying its name. You then pick it from four choices, and the answer fills in the full story.

The landmarks are spread across the whole world and across thousands of years. Some are ancient: the three pyramids on the edge of Cairo, built about 4,500 years ago and the tallest things people made for the next 38 centuries; the ring of standing stones on an English plain; the marble temple to a warrior goddess above Athens; the Maya step-pyramid in the forests of Mexico. Others are barely a century old: the concrete figure of Jesus on a mountain above Rio de Janeiro, finished in 1931, or the shell-roofed concert house that juts into Sydney's harbour, opened in 1973. A few, like the row of carved stone giants on one of the loneliest islands in the Pacific, sit in between and are still not fully explained.

Part of the fun is learning to read a landmark by its shape. A tall thin spike is usually a tower or a minaret; a rounded top is a dome, often over a tomb or a place of worship; a stepped triangle is a pyramid; rows of columns holding up a triangular roof mean an ancient Greek or Roman temple; a wide deck slung between two tall towers is a suspension bridge. Materials give hints too, from rough prehistoric boulders to polished white marble to 20th-century concrete and steel.

Many of these places share a life story. They were built to show off the power or wealth of a king, an emperor, a city or a religion. They were then half-ruined by earthquakes, wars, or people carting away the stone for other buildings. Several were more or less forgotten by the outside world for centuries before a traveller, an explorer or an archaeologist brought them back to attention. Today almost all are protected sites, many on the UNESCO World Heritage list, and several are so popular that visitor numbers have to be capped. Their outlines turn up on banknotes, stamps, flags and national badges all over the world.

The clues deliberately leave out the landmark's name and any single word that would instantly give it away, so getting the answer means recognising the shape and the history rather than reading a label. Every photograph is a freely licensed image from Wikimedia Commons, chosen from public-domain or Creative Commons sources so there is no copyright question, and every fact in the clue and the answer has been checked. The language is kept simple on purpose, so the quiz plays the same whether you grew up near one of these places or have only ever seen it in pictures.