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60 free Cape Town trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Cape Town began as a vegetable garden for passing ships and became South Africa's oldest city and legislative capital. This quiz covers the story: Dias and the Cape of Storms, a Portuguese admiral killed by trained cattle, Van Riebeeck's 1652 way-station, the Castle of Good Hope, the British takeover, District Six, Langa, Robben Island and Mandela's first speech from the City Hall balcony. The natural setting gets its due: Table Mountain's height, tablecloth cloud and 1929 cableway, fynbos, the Cape Doctor, the true southernmost point of Africa, Boulders Beach penguins, Kirstenbosch and the Cape Flats. There are questions on the V&A Waterfront's royal namesake, Bo-Kaap, the 2010 World Cup stadium, the Cycle Tour, the first heart transplant, the city's three languages, Kaapse Klopse, Day Zero and Constantia wine. Easy questions ask which capital Cape Town is and what lives at Boulders; hard ones want the Australian shrub that fixed the Cape Flats, the size of the 1945 foreshore reclamation and the share of the city freed in 1833. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on the city and its landmarks, and each question carries the sentence that supports it. Try our South Africa and Nelson Mandela quizzes next.
30 of 60 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Cape Town is which of South Africa's three capitals?
The legislative capital
Parliament sits there; Pretoria holds the executive and Bloemfontein the judiciary. It is also the country's oldest city.
Q 02Cape Town is South Africa's second-largest city by population after which?
Johannesburg
Johannesburg overtook it by the 1936 census, as mining pulled the country's centre of gravity inland.
Q 03Which Portuguese navigator, the first European to reach the area in 1488, named it the 'Cape of Storms'?
Bartolomeu Dias
King John II renamed it the Cape of Good Hope for the optimism of an open sea route to India; da Gama sighted it in 1497.
Q 04Who founded the Dutch settlement at the Cape in 1652 as a way-station for East Indies ships?
Jan van Riebeeck
He worked for the VOC, the Dutch East India Company, and built the Fort de Goede Hoop that the stone Castle later replaced.
Q 05What unusual weapon did Khoikhoi warriors use to kill Francisco de Almeida at the 1510 Battle of Salt River?
Cattle trained to answer whistles
Sixty-four of his men died with him; the Goringhaiqua clan later traded fresh meat to passing ships for tobacco, copper and iron.
Q 06The Castle of Good Hope, built 1666–79, is the oldest existing building in South Africa; what shape is it?
Pentagonal
It is considered the best-preserved Dutch East India Company fort; land reclamation has left it inland from Table Bay.
Q 07Britain permanently gained Cape Town under which 1814 agreement?
Anglo-Dutch
Britain had seized it in 1795, handed it back in 1803 and retaken it in 1806 after the Battle of Blaauwberg.
Q 08Which suburb, declared whites-only in 1965, was demolished with over 60,000 residents forcibly removed?
District Six
Most were relocated to the Cape Flats under the Group Areas Act; a Homecoming Centre now commemorates the community.
Q 09Nelson Mandela served how many of his 27 years in prison on Robben Island?
18
Two other Robben Island inmates, Kgalema Motlanthe and Jacob Zuma, also went on to become president.
Q 10Robben Island's name comes from an archaic Dutch word for which animals?
Seals
The flat, oval island lies about 7 km off Bloubergstrand and was also used as a leper colony and animal quarantine station.
Q 11From which building's balcony did Mandela give his first public speech in 27 years on 11 February 1990?
Cape Town City Hall
The first democratic election followed four years later, on 27 April 1994.
Q 12Nobel Square at the V&A Waterfront has statues of Mandela, Tutu, de Klerk and which other Peace laureate?
Albert Luthuli
Luthuli, the ANC president, won in 1960, decades before the others.
Q 13Table Mountain's flat top rises roughly how high above the city?
1,000 m
Its highest point is 1,086 metres above sea level, about 19 metres above the upper cable station.
Q 21Boulders Beach near Simon's Town is famous for a colony of which animals?
African penguins
Ferries from the Waterfront also visit the fur seal colonies on Seal and Duiker Islands.
Q 22Kirstenbosch, founded in 1913, was the world's first botanical garden devoted to what?
A country's indigenous plants
It cultivates more than 7,000 species and covers five of South Africa's six biomes; its protea collections are the highlight.
Q 23The brightly painted, cobblestoned Bo-Kaap on Signal Hill was formerly known as what?
The Malay Quarter
Q 14The thin strip of cloud that sometimes forms over Table Mountain is known colloquially as what?
The Tablecloth
Locals also call it the 'Karos'; the two flanking peaks are Devil's Peak and Lion's Head.
Q 15The strong south-easterly wind of spring and summer is nicknamed the Cape Doctor because it does what?
Blows air pollution away
Cape Town has a hot-summer Mediterranean climate with wet winters and dry summers.
Q 16About 80 percent of Table Mountain's 2,285 plant species belong to which vegetation type?
Fynbos
The name means 'fine bush'; the national park around the mountain draws 4.2 million visitors a year, more than any other in South Africa.
Q 17The Table Mountain cableway first opened in which year?
1929
It has been refurbished three times since, most recently gaining enlarged gondolas.
Q 18Table Mountain's highest point is marked by what, built in 1865 for a trigonometrical survey?
Maclear's Beacon
Sir Thomas Maclear's stone cairn stands at 1,086 metres at the eastern end of the plateau.
Q 19Contrary to popular belief, the Cape of Good Hope is not Africa's southernmost point; which headland is?
Agulhas
Agulhas lies about 150 km to the east-southeast, and it is there, not at the Cape, that the two oceans' currents officially meet.
Q 20The Cape Peninsula juts roughly how far south from the city before ending at Cape Point?
40 km
More than 70 peaks above 300 metres lie within the metropolitan limits, and the sandy Cape Flats join the peninsula to the mainland.
It holds South Africa's largest concentration of pre-1850 buildings; the Nurul Islam Mosque there dates from 1844.
Q 24What does the name 'Bo-Kaap' mean?
Above the Cape
Jan de Waal built the first small rental houses at the foot of Signal Hill in 1763; more than half of residents today identify as Muslim.
Q 25Cape Town's V&A Waterfront is named after Queen Victoria and which of her sons?
Prince Alfred
It sits on the oldest working harbour in the Southern Hemisphere and is the city's most-visited attraction, home to the Two Oceans Aquarium.
Q 26Cape Town Stadium in Green Point was built for which event?
The 2010 FIFA World Cup
It seated 64,100 for the tournament, later cut to 55,000, and hosted a semi-final; the Stormers rugby side now plays there.
Q 27The Cape Town Cycle Tour holds what world record?
Largest individually timed road race
It was also the first event outside Europe admitted to the UCI's Golden Bike series.
Q 28Which Cape Town hospital, founded in 1938, hosted the first human heart transplant?
Groote Schuur
It is the teaching hospital of the University of Cape Town's medical school, on the slopes of Devil's Peak.
Q 29Which first language was most common among surveyed Cape Town residents, at about 36 percent?
Afrikaans
Xhosa came second at 29.8 percent and English third at 28.4, making the city genuinely trilingual.
Q 30The Cape Town Minstrel Carnival is held each year on which date, known as 'Tweede Nuwe Jaar'?
2 January
The name means 'Second New Year', a tradition rooted in the city's Cape Malay and Coloured communities.