El Paso Trivia
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50 free El Paso trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
El Paso sits where Texas, New Mexico and Chihuahua meet, at the pass in the mountains that gave the city its name. This El Paso trivia quiz covers the geography first: the Rio Grande and Ciudad Juárez, the Franklin Mountains and the country's largest urban park, the Chihuahuan Desert, the Mountain Time Zone quirk and the 302 days of sunshine behind the Sun City nickname. Then it digs into the history and the landmarks. You will meet Juan de Oñate's 1598 Thanksgiving, the Ysleta Mission, Fort Bliss, the Taft-Díaz summit of 1909, the Chamizal settlement, John Wesley Hardin's last dice game and Concordia Cemetery, alongside UTEP's Bhutanese architecture, the 1966 Texas Western champions, the Sun Bowl, the Chihuahuas, the Wyler Aerial Tramway, the Plaza Theatre, Chico's Tacos, the Star on the Mountain and famous El Pasoans from Gene Roddenberry to Khalid and Beto O'Rourke. The 50 questions range from easy to hard, and every answer was checked against documented sources, so the answer key holds up whether you are a lifelong Chuco resident or planning a first visit.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01El Paso sits across the Rio Grande from which Mexican city?
Ciudad Juárez
Ciudad Juárez is named for Benito Juárez, the Mexican president who made the town his headquarters in 1865–66 while fighting the French intervention.
Q 02Which interstate highway runs east–west through El Paso?
Interstate 10
Interstate 10 runs almost 880 miles across Texas, so El Paso, at its western end, is closer by road to Los Angeles than to Orange, Texas, on the Louisiana line.
Q 03Which time zone does El Paso observe?
Mountain Time
Mountain Time: El Paso and neighbouring Hudspeth County are the only parts of Texas officially outside Central Time, so the city keeps the same clock as New Mexico rather than Dallas or Houston.
Q 04El Paso's abundant desert sun earned it which nickname?
Sun City
Sun City is the nickname, and it carried over to the city's buses, which ran as Sun City Area Transit until 1987, when the system was renamed Sun Metro.
Q 05South of the border, the Rio Grande that flows past El Paso goes by which name?
Río Bravo
Río Bravo, or Río Bravo del Norte, is the river's Mexican name; it became the international boundary at El Paso in 1848, under the treaty that ended the Mexican–American War.
Q 06Which 2006 Disney film tells the story of Texas Western's 1966 championship basketball team?
Glory Road
Glory Road stars Josh Lucas as the Texas Western coach, shown bucking convention by starting the best players he could find: the first all-Black lineup in an NCAA final.
Q 07Rights to which mineral, hauled from dry lake beds east of El Paso, set off a deadly feud in 1877?
Salt
Salt from lake beds about 100 miles east was the prize in the 1877 Salt War, in which a besieged company of Texas Rangers surrendered to an armed crowd of local residents.
Q 08Which cowboy boot brand grew from a shoe-repair shop that a former Army cobbler opened in El Paso?
Tony Lama
Tony Lama mended soldiers' boots as an Army cobbler at the local post, then opened his own shop; he and one assistant made just 20 pairs of boots in their first year.
Q 09El Paso's Mexican neighbor across the Rio Grande was known by what name until 1888?
Paso del Norte
Paso del Norte, the Pass of the North, shared its name with the Texas town after 1859, which caused endless confusion until the older Mexican city was renamed in 1888.
Q 10Which Spanish explorer celebrated a Thanksgiving Mass by the Rio Grande near El Paso in 1598?
Juan de Oñate
Juan de Oñate's colonising expedition held a Mass of thanksgiving beside the Rio Grande on 30 April 1598, 23 years before the Pilgrims' 1621 feast at Plymouth.
Q 11Which mission in El Paso is recognized as the oldest continuously operated parish in Texas?
Ysleta
Ysleta Mission was founded in 1682 for Tigua people who came south with the Spanish after the 1680 Pueblo Revolt; the Tigua still call the church San Antonio, after their patron saint.
Q 12Which colonial route linked Mexico City to Santa Fe by way of El Paso?
El Camino Real de Tierra Adentro
El Camino Real de Tierra Adentro, the Royal Road of the Interior, was a supply line: wagon caravans hauled goods up it from Mexico City to the missions of the north.
Q 13El Paso County was established in 1850 with which town as its first county seat?
San Elizario
Q 21Which rocket pioneer was housed at El Paso's Army post from 1945 with his team of engineers?
Wernher von Braun
Wernher von Braun and about 125 German engineers were brought to the post under Project Paperclip; they worked on Army rockets there until moving to Huntsville, Alabama, in 1950.
Q 22Which general was stationed at El Paso's Army post in 1914 and later led the expedition against Pancho Villa?
John J. Pershing
John J. Pershing took command at the post in 1914 and led the 1916 Punitive Expedition into Mexico after Pancho Villa's raid on Columbus, New Mexico, that March.
Q 23Which El Paso border dispute, caused by the shifting Rio Grande, did a 1963 treaty settle?
Chamizal
San Elizario, an old Spanish presidio town, was then the county's largest settlement; the seat moved more than once before a hotly contested election gave it to the city of El Paso in 1883.
Q 14Who was hired in 1859 to survey and lay out the street plan of downtown El Paso?
Anson Mills
Anson Mills, a young surveyor who later became an Army general, platted the townsite in 1859 and gave it the name El Paso, replacing the settlement's earlier name, Franklin.
Q 15What arrived in 1881 and made El Paso a boomtown?
The railroads
The railroads reached El Paso in 1881, and a town of 736 people at the 1880 census had more than 10,000 by 1890.
Q 16What lawless nickname did El Paso earn as a boomtown in the 1880s?
Six-shooter Capital
Six-shooter Capital was the name El Paso earned when saloons, gambling halls and brothels lined its streets; the city outlawed gambling and prostitution in 1905, though by other accounts both lasted until an Army crackdown in World War I.
Q 17Which Old West gunfighter was shot dead in El Paso's Acme Saloon in 1895?
John Wesley Hardin
John Wesley Hardin had studied law in prison and been free about eighteen months when constable John Selman shot him from behind in the Acme Saloon on 19 August 1895.
Q 18Which historic El Paso cemetery is the resting place of Buffalo Soldiers, Texas Rangers and Old West gunfighters?
Concordia
Concordia dates from 1856 and holds more than 60,000 graves; Mexico's deposed president Victoriano Huerta was first buried here before his remains were moved.
Q 19Which US and Mexican presidents met in El Paso in 1909, the first such summit?
William Howard Taft and Porfirio Díaz
William Howard Taft and Porfirio Díaz met on 16 October 1909; after the talks in El Paso, Taft crossed the river for a banquet at the Mexican customhouse, the first time a sitting US president had entered Mexico.
Q 20Which US Army post headquartered in El Paso is home to the 1st Armored Division?
Fort Bliss
Fort Bliss, headquartered in El Paso, became home to the 1st Armored Division in 2011, when the division moved back from Germany after 40 years there.
The Chamizal dispute began when the river moved south in the 1860s, leaving Mexican farmland on the American side; the settlement returned land to Mexico and sent the Rio Grande down a new concrete channel.
Q 24Under what name was the University of Texas at El Paso founded in 1913?
State School of Mines and Metallurgy
State School of Mines and Metallurgy was the name in the 1913 law that created it; classes began in 1914, and the mining roots survive in the Miners team name.
Q 25UTEP's campus buildings copy the fortress-monastery style of which Himalayan region?
Bhutan
Bhutan's style was proposed by Kathleen Worrell, wife of the school's first dean, when the campus was rebuilt on a new site after a 1916 fire destroyed the main building.
Q 26In 1966, Texas Western's all-Black starting five beat which team for the NCAA basketball title?
Kentucky
Kentucky, coached by Adolph Rupp, fielded an all-white team and lost 72–65; in the years that followed, major college programs stepped up their recruiting of Black players.
Q 27Who coached the 1966 Texas Western champions?
Don Haskins
Don Haskins, nicknamed 'the Bear', said he never set out to make a statement: he simply wanted his five best players on the floor so he could win the game.
Q 28Which is the only college bowl game older than El Paso's Sun Bowl?
Rose
Only the Rose Bowl is older: the Sun Bowl began on New Year's Day 1935 as a game between Texas high school teams and switched to college sides a year later.
Q 29Which cereal's mascot named the Sun Bowl from 2019?
Frosted Flakes
Frosted Flakes put Tony the Tiger in the game's title; an earlier sponsor went further, and for five seasons from 1989 the game was the John Hancock Bowl, with no 'Sun' in its name at all.
Q 30El Paso's Triple-A baseball team is the Chihuahuas, an affiliate of which MLB club?
San Diego Padres
The San Diego Padres' Triple-A club moved from Tucson to El Paso in 2014, playing at Southwest University Park, built where the old city hall stood.