Urban Trivia
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125 free Urban trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
This urban trivia quiz is about cities as cities: which are biggest, oldest, highest, coldest, windiest and most crowded; who founded them and when; what they were called before; how their subways, bridges, towers and squares came to be; and where the nicknames come from. It ranges from Uruk and Jericho to Jakarta and Dhaka, from Vatican City to Chongqing, from the first Tube line to the busiest station on Earth. If you want American cities specifically, our US cities quiz covers those. The easy questions are ones most travellers can answer: what Tokyo used to be called, which country is a city inside Rome, why the Big Apple is the Big Apple. Then it climbs: which city moved 29 times before settling, which capital sits inside a national park, what Bangkok's full ceremonial name is like, why Wellington and Reykjavík hold their records, and which brand-new capitals replaced Rio, Yangon and Almaty. Every answer was checked against the encyclopaedia entry for the city or subject before publishing, and the sentence that supports it is stored with each question.
30 of 125 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01A megacity is usually defined as an urban area with more than how many people?
10,000,000
A megacity is an urban area of more than 10,000,000 people; because surveys draw a city's edge differently, the UN counted 33 of them in 2025 while another tally found 42.
Q 02Which Southeast Asian capital did the UN rank in 2025 as the world's most populous city?
Jakarta
Jakarta's urban area held nearly 42 million people in the UN's 2025 count, which applied one common definition of a city worldwide and dropped long-time leader Tokyo to third.
Q 03Which city is widely considered the most densely populated built-up urban area in the world?
Dhaka
Dhaka is widely considered the world's densest major urban area, at well over 20,000 people per square kilometre; migrants from rural Bangladesh have swelled it to about 37 million on the UN's 2025 count.
Q 04Which Chinese municipality is the largest 'city proper' in the world, at roughly the size of Austria?
Chongqing
Chongqing municipality covers about 82,000 square kilometres, close to Austria's area, and holds some 32 million people, many of them in rural counties far from the city centre.
Q 05Which city served as the US capital for the decade before Washington took over in 1800?
Philadelphia
Philadelphia was the temporary US capital from 1790 to 1800 under the Residence Act, while the new federal city of Washington was being built on the Potomac.
Q 06Which Mesopotamian city do most archaeologists consider the first true city?
Uruk
Uruk, in southern Mesopotamia, is usually called the first true city; writing first appeared there around 3200 BC, and legend credits its great wall to King Gilgamesh.
Q 07Which city is generally credited as the first to reach one million inhabitants?
Rome
Rome is generally credited as the first city to reach one million inhabitants, around the reign of Augustus; after the empire fell, its population shrank to a few tens of thousands.
Q 08Which city is described as the oldest capital city in the world?
Damascus
Damascus has been settled since at least the third millennium BC and is usually called the oldest continuously inhabited capital; its name also gave English the fabric word damask.
Q 09What kind of 8.5-metre stone structure, built at Jericho about 10,000 years ago, has a staircase inside?
A tower
A tower: Jericho's stone tower, with 22 steps inside, dates from about 8000 BCE and is among the oldest monumental buildings known; a reliable spring had drawn settlers there from roughly 9000 BCE.
Q 10The Bible calls Jericho the city of what trees?
Palms
Palms: Deuteronomy 34:3 calls Jericho 'the city of palm trees'; the town is an oasis in the Jordan Valley, where a copious spring has fed date palms since ancient times.
Q 11The Neolithic proto-city of Çatalhöyük is in which modern country?
Turkey
Çatalhöyük lies in Turkey, on the Konya Plain of central Anatolia; around 7000 BC its several thousand residents lived in houses packed so tightly, with no streets, that they came and went through the roof.
Q 12Mohenjo-daro, built around 2500 BCE, belonged to which civilisation?
Indus Valley
Mohenjo-daro, in Pakistan's Sindh province, was one of the largest cities of the Indus Valley civilisation; abandoned by about 1700 BCE, it lay forgotten until archaeologists rediscovered it in the 1920s.
Q 13Which was the largest city in the pre-Columbian Americas?
Tenochtitlan
Tenochtitlan, the Aztec capital, was linked to the mainland by causeways and held more than 200,000 people before Spanish forces and their allies besieged and destroyed it in 1521.
Q 21Citizenship of the pope's city-state normally depends on what?
Holding a job there
Holding a job there is the usual route: citizenship comes with an appointment to serve the Holy See, not with birth on its soil, and normally ends when the post does.
Q 22Which is the world's most densely populated sovereign state?
Monaco
Monaco squeezes about 38,000 people into roughly 2 square kilometres, the highest density of any sovereign state, even after land reclaimed from the sea enlarged it by about a fifth.
Q 23Which family has ruled the principality on the French Riviera since 1297?
Grimaldi
The Grimaldi family arrived in 1297, when François Grimaldi, by tradition disguised as a friar, seized the fortress on the rock; the family has returned after each interruption, the last under French rule from 1793 to 1814.
Q 14Mexico City's main square, laid out over the ceremonial centre of the Aztec capital, is popularly known as what?
The Zócalo
The Zócalo has been the city's gathering place since Aztec times; the Spanish raised their cathedral and the viceroy's palace on its edges, and its formal name is Plaza de la Constitución.
Q 15Which of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World stood at Alexandria?
The Lighthouse
The Lighthouse of Alexandria, on the island of Pharos, was completed under Ptolemy II around 280 BC and stood over 100 metres tall until medieval earthquakes toppled it.
Q 16Which legendary Phoenician queen is said to have founded Carthage?
Dido
Dido, also called Elissa, is the legendary princess of Tyre who founded Carthage; in the tale she was offered only the land an oxhide could cover, so she cut the hide into thin strips to ring a whole hill.
Q 17In Roman legend, who founded Rome in 753 BC after killing his twin brother?
Romulus
Romulus killed Remus, in the best-known telling for mocking and leaping over his half-built city wall; Romans celebrated the founding every 21 April.
Q 18A first-century BC poem by Tibullus calls Italy's capital which kind of city?
Eternal
Eternal: Tibullus wrote of the walls of the 'eternal city'; Ovid later echoed the phrase, and the nickname has stuck for two thousand years.
Q 19Which country lies entirely inside another country's capital city?
Vatican City
Vatican City lies wholly inside Italy's capital; the 1929 Lateran Treaty made it a sovereign state, ending a standoff that began when Italy seized the papal lands in 1870.
Q 20Which corps has guarded the popes since 1506?
The Swiss Guard
The Swiss Guard lost most of its men defending Pope Clement VII when imperial troops sacked the city in 1527; new recruits are still sworn in each 6 May, the anniversary.
Q 24Which small territory is described as the most densely populated place on Earth?
Macau
Macau, a former Portuguese colony, packs about 700,000 people into some 33 square kilometres, over 20,000 per square kilometre; reclaiming land from the sea has tripled its area.
Q 25As of 2025, which city has the most skyscrapers, counting buildings taller than 150 metres?
Hong Kong
Hong Kong has more buildings over 150 metres than any other city, well over 500; steep mountains and scarce flat land left it little choice but to build upward.
Q 26Britain's 1898 lease on the New Territories ran for how many years?
99
The 1898 Second Convention of Peking leased the New Territories to Britain for 99 years, so in 1997 Britain handed back the whole colony, including land it had been ceded outright.
Q 27Which ungoverned Hong Kong enclave, demolished in 1993–94, packed about 33,000 people into just 2.6 hectares?
Kowloon Walled City
Kowloon Walled City began as a Chinese fort that Britain's 1898 lease left as an enclave; neither side governed it, so it grew into an unregulated maze of towers until a park replaced it.
Q 28About how many people live in Dharavi, often called one of the world's largest slums?
1,000,000
Dharavi is usually put at around 1,000,000 residents on roughly 2.4 square kilometres in the heart of India's biggest city; far from idle, it hums with leather, pottery and recycling workshops.
Q 29The word 'favela' was first used for a slum in which city?
Rio de Janeiro
Soldiers returning from the 1897 Canudos War settled a hill in Rio de Janeiro they called Morro da Favela, after the favela plant of Bahia, and the name spread to all such settlements.
Q 30Which capital has lions and rhinos roaming a national park inside its city limits?
Nairobi
Nairobi National Park, established in 1946, begins only about 7 km from the city centre; it is fenced on three sides, with the south left open so herds can migrate, and lions roam within sight of the skyline.