Portugal Trivia
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49 free Portugal trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
41 free Portugal trivia questions with answers. Portugal trivia for travellers, expats, geography buffs and quiz hosts. The 49 questions start easy, with the capital, the neighbour, the islands and Ronaldo's birthplace, then dig into what makes the country distinctive: the westernmost point of Europe, the earthquake that flattened Lisbon on All Saints' Day, the revolution won with carnations, and the alliance with England that has held since 1386. There is a full round on the Age of Discovery (Henry the Navigator, Dias, da Gama, Magellan, the empire that lasted until 1999), plus food and drink (bacalhau, pastel de nata, piri piri, how port is made), fado, azulejos, the Rooster of Barcelos, Fátima, Sintra and Euro 2016. Every answer has been checked against a reference source, shown under each question once you answer, so it holds up in a classroom or a pub quiz.
30 of 49 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Portugal shares its only land border with which country?
Spain
Spain is Portugal's only neighbour, sharing a roughly 1,200-kilometre border that has barely changed since a treaty of 1297, making it one of Europe's oldest frontiers.
Q 02Which Atlantic archipelago, an autonomous region of Portugal, gave its name to a fortified wine?
Madeira
Madeira's wine was fortified to survive long sea voyages; the heat of the ships' holds turned out to improve it, so makers now warm the casks on purpose.
Q 03Where is Mount Pico, Portugal's highest point at 2,351 metres?
The Azores
The Azores hold Mount Pico, a volcano on Pico Island that beats the mainland's highest summit, Torre in the Serra da Estrela, by more than 350 metres.
Q 04Cabo da Roca, near Sintra, holds what geographical distinction?
Westernmost point of mainland Europe
Cabo da Roca is the westernmost point of mainland Europe, edging out Cape Finisterre in Galicia, the headland whose Latin name means 'end of the earth'.
Q 05Lisbon is usually ranked as the second-oldest capital city in Europe, after which city?
Athens
Athens is usually placed first and Lisbon second among Europe's oldest capitals; Lisbon was already the Roman municipium Felicitas Julia Olisipo under Julius Caesar, centuries before most European capitals existed.
Q 06The 1755 earthquake that destroyed Lisbon struck on the morning of which religious feast?
All Saints' Day
The quake struck on 1 November 1755, All Saints' Day, while churches were full; shaking lasted up to six minutes and about 40 minutes later a tsunami swept over survivors who had fled to the docks.
Q 07Portugal's overthrow of the Estado Novo dictatorship on 25 April 1974 is known by what name?
The Carnation Revolution
The Carnation Revolution took its name from the red carnations that restaurant worker Celeste Caeiro handed to soldiers, who slid them into their rifle muzzles during a coup in which almost no shots were fired.
Q 08Portugal's 1910 revolution swapped the royal blue-and-white flag for green and which colour?
Red
Red was the colour of the revolutionaries' own flags; paired with green, it replaced the blue and white Portugal's flag had carried since 1830, as the 20-year-old king fled into exile in England.
Q 09Which organisation counted Portugal, then a dictatorship, among its founding members?
NATO
NATO counted Portugal among its twelve founders in 1949 even though the country was a dictatorship; it joined the EEC only in 1986, twelve years after the regime fell.
Q 10The 14th-century pact sealing the Anglo-Portuguese Alliance, the world's oldest still in force, is named after which place?
Windsor
The Treaty of Windsor was sealed by the marriage of John I of Portugal to Philippa of Lancaster; Britain was still invoking the alliance in 1943, to gain wartime air bases from neutral Portugal.
Q 11The Portuguese Empire ended when which territory was handed over in 1999?
Macau
Macau was handed to China on 20 December 1999 after 442 years; Portugal had stopped treating it as a colony in the 1970s, calling it Chinese territory under Portuguese administration.
Q 12Henry the Navigator's career began with the 1415 capture of which North African city?
Ceuta
Ceuta fell to an army led by his father, King John I, with Henry among the princes who fought there; despite his nickname, he never sailed on a voyage of exploration himself.
Q 13Which Portuguese navigator became the first European to round the southern tip of Africa, in 1488?
Bartolomeu Dias
Bartolomeu Dias rounded the cape far out to sea and first sighted it on the voyage home in May 1488; tradition says he called it the Cape of Storms and that his king renamed it Good Hope.
Q 21A Portuguese saying claims there are how many ways to cook bacalhau, the salt-cod staple?
365
365 is the count in one favourite saying, a recipe for every day of the year, though another claims 1,001; either way, the Portuguese call salt cod their 'fiel amigo', the faithful friend.
Q 22Port wine is fortified by adding a neutral grape spirit at what point in the process?
Partway through fermentation
Port is made by adding grape spirit partway through fermentation, which kills the yeast while grape sugar remains, so the wine stays sweet as well as strong.
Q 23Port wine is named after the city of Porto, but its grapes grow in the valley of which river?
The Douro
Q 14The first fleet to sail from Europe around Africa to India anchored off which port?
Calicut
Calicut, now Kozhikode, was the rich spice port of the Malabar Coast; its ruler, the Zamorin, was unimpressed by the cloth, hats and honey the Portuguese offered as royal gifts.
Q 15Which Portuguese navigator, spurned at home, led a rival crown's round-the-world voyage?
Ferdinand Magellan
Ferdinand Magellan took his plan for reaching the Spice Islands to a neighbouring king after his own refused it; he was killed in the Philippines in 1521, but one of his ships completed the circuit.
Q 16Which Portuguese fishing town is famous for some of the biggest waves ever surfed?
Nazaré
Nazaré owes its giants to a deep undersea canyon that points Atlantic swells at the beach; in 2020 a German surfer rode a wave measured at 26.2 metres there, a record at the time.
Q 17Portugal supplies about half the world's harvest of which natural material?
Cork
Cork is the bark of the cork oak, stripped without felling the tree; the bark grows back, so the same oak can be harvested again roughly once a decade.
Q 18Which is the only country in Asia with Portuguese as an official language?
East Timor
East Timor declared independence from Portugal in 1975, only to be invaded by Indonesia days later; it made Portuguese an official language again, beside Tetum, on regaining independence in 2002.
Q 19Fado, Portugal's mournful national song style, takes its name from a Latin word meaning what?
Fate
Fate, fatum in Latin, suits songs that dwell on loss and resignation; when the great fado singer Amália Rodrigues died in 1999, Portugal declared three days of national mourning.
Q 20Which egg-custard tart, devised by Lisbon monks, is Portugal's best-known sweet?
Pastel de nata
Pastel de nata began with the monks of a Lisbon monastery; when the religious houses were closed in 1834 the recipe passed to a nearby sugar refinery, whose shop has sold the tarts since 1837.
The Douro valley's vineyards boomed after a 1703 treaty cut English duty on Portuguese wine, and in 1756 the valley became one of the world's first wine regions with legally fixed boundaries.
Q 24Which fiery chilli, grown by Portuguese settlers in Mozambique and Angola, gives its name to a famous grilled-chicken sauce?
Piri piri
Piri piri is a small African bird's-eye chilli bred from plants the Portuguese carried over from the Americas; the Mozambican-style grilled chicken it flavours inspired the Nando's chain, founded in Johannesburg in 1987.
Q 25Portugal won its first major football trophy at Euro 2016 by beating which host nation in the final?
France
Portugal beat hosts France 1-0 after extra time at the Stade de France; Éder scored in the 109th minute, long after captain Cristiano Ronaldo had gone off injured.
Q 26Which Ballon d'Or winner led Portugal to third place at the 1966 World Cup?
Eusébio
Eusébio, the 1965 Ballon d'Or winner, top-scored with nine goals at the 1966 World Cup; four of them came in the quarter-final, as Portugal recovered from 3-0 down against North Korea to win 5-3.
Q 27Which Portuguese writer won the 1998 Nobel Prize in Literature?
José Saramago
José Saramago won it for novels such as Blindness; earlier in the decade he had moved to the Spanish island of Lanzarote after Portugal's government barred one of his books from a European literary prize.
Q 28Which city, Portugal's medieval capital from 1131, houses its oldest university?
Coimbra
Coimbra was the medieval capital long before it kept the university: founded in Lisbon in 1290, the university settled in Coimbra for good only in 1537.
Q 29The Jerónimos Monastery in Lisbon exemplifies which ornate style named after a Portuguese king?
Manueline
Manueline wraps buildings in carved ropes, coral and armillary spheres because sea trade paid for them; the name was coined only in 1842, three centuries after the king it honours.
Q 30Whose tomb was installed in Lisbon's Jerónimos church in 1880, alongside that of a celebrated poet?
Vasco da Gama
Vasco da Gama's tomb was placed there in 1880; the monastery had been built near the beach his fleet sailed from, paid for by a tax on the profits of the India trade.