Santa Barbara Trivia
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This Santa Barbara trivia quiz has 97 free questions with answers and covers the American Riviera from the Chumash villages and the Queen of the Missions to the Funk Zone and the film festival. There are questions on why the streets dogleg, the earthquake that gave the city its Spanish Colonial look, the 'most beautiful public building in the United States', the wharf that made the town reachable, the Japanese submarine that shelled the coast in 1942, the silent-film studio that predated Hollywood, the seaplane tests that became Lockheed, and the 1969 oil blowout that helped launch the environmental movement. It also takes in Old Spanish Days, the Solstice Parade, the fig tree by the train station, the Santa Barbara Bowl, UC Santa Barbara's Gauchos, Reagan's Western White House in the mountains, Montecito's famous neighbours, the surfers, the soap opera and the pop star born there. Every answer has been checked against the Wikipedia pages for the city and its landmarks, and each explanation adds one detail worth remembering.
30 of 97 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Santa Barbara's Mediterranean climate and south-facing coastline have earned it what nickname?
The American Riviera
Santa Barbara is marketed as the American Riviera; its east-west coastline faces south and is backed by mountains, echoing the sheltered, sunny shore of the French Riviera.
Q 02Which mountain range rises steeply right behind Santa Barbara?
The Santa Ynez Mountains
The Santa Ynez Mountains run east to west, so the city at their foot faces south across the water and sits squeezed between steep slopes and the sea.
Q 03Which Native people had villages along the Santa Barbara shore long before the Spanish arrived?
The Chumash
The Chumash traded between the mainland and the Channel Islands in tomols, seagoing canoes built from redwood planks and sealed with pine pitch and natural tar.
Q 04Which explorer, sailing for Spain, led the first European ships up the Santa Barbara Channel in 1542?
Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo
Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo met the coast's villagers that October but never made it home; he died on the voyage in January 1543, and his crew pushed on north without him.
Q 05Which religious order founded Mission Santa Barbara in 1786 and has never left?
The Franciscans
The Franciscans never left Mission Santa Barbara, even after Mexico took the mission lands in the 1830s, so friars and novices still live beside an archive of records from across the mission chain.
Q 06By what nickname is Mission Santa Barbara known?
The Queen of the Missions
Mission Santa Barbara is called the Queen of the Missions; after the 1812 earthquake wrecked its adobe church, the friars rebuilt in stone, and it is now the only California mission with twin bell towers.
Q 07Which American officer's battalion took Santa Barbara without bloodshed on 27 December 1846?
John C. Frémont
John C. Frémont's California Battalion crossed the rain-soaked San Marcos Pass and entered Santa Barbara unopposed on 27 December 1846; the town formally became American with the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo.
Q 08Why do some downtown Santa Barbara intersections have awkward doglegs?
The 1851 surveyor botched the block measurements
The 1851 surveyor, Salisbury Haley, botched the block measurements, so some streets miss each other where his errors piled up; his chain is said to have been patched with stretchy rawhide.
Q 09Stearns Wharf, built in 1872, was named after a local businessman in which trade?
Lumber
Lumber was John Peck Stearns's business; he ran a yard at the foot of State Street and built the long wharf in 1872 so ocean-going ships could tie up there even at low tide.
Q 10Which president visited Santa Barbara in 1891, the first sitting president to do so?
Benjamin Harrison
Benjamin Harrison came through in April 1891 and Santa Barbara threw him a floral parade, with residents turned out in Spanish-style costume; the railroad had reached town only four years before.
Q 11The Summerland Oil Field, east of Santa Barbara, is widely credited with what distinction?
World's first offshore oil drilling
Summerland gets credit for the world's first offshore oil drilling because in 1896 drillers followed the field out to sea, sinking wells from piers built over the Pacific; earlier over-water wells stood in lakes.
Q 12Which silent-film studio, the California arm of a Chicago company, ran a large lot on Mission Street in Santa Barbara?
Flying A Studios
Flying A Studios once made Santa Barbara a film town to rival Hollywood: the Chicago company's lot turned out hundreds of silent films from 1912, until its top people left for Los Angeles around 1920.
Q 13Which aerospace giant is named after two brothers who built seaplanes in a Santa Barbara garage from 1916?
Q 21Which rule applies to every entry in Santa Barbara's Summer Solstice Parade?
No written words or banners
No written words or banners, and no logos or engines either, so every float is pushed or pulled by people; what began in 1974 as a local mime's birthday party has grown into one of the county's biggest events.
Q 22The I Madonnari festival, held each Memorial Day weekend at Santa Barbara's Mission, features what kind of art?
Chalk drawings on asphalt
Chalk drawings on asphalt fill the plaza because each square is sold to a sponsor: Kathy Koury began the festival in 1987 to fund arts teaching in county schools, borrowing the idea from a village in northern Italy.
Q 23Santa Barbara's giant Moreton Bay fig grew from a seedling given in 1876 by whom?
Lockheed
Lockheed is how Allan and Malcolm Loughead respelled a surname people kept mangling; from 1916 they built seaplanes in a garage on lower State Street and launched their big F-1 flying boat off the waterfront in 1918.
Q 14Which style did Santa Barbara rebuild in after its 1925 earthquake?
Spanish Colonial
Spanish Colonial won out because the Community Arts Association had pushed the style for years, so when the quake flattened much of State Street its members were ready to steer the rebuilding toward a single look.
Q 15Which Santa Barbara public building, finished in 1929, fills a whole downtown block and is topped by a clock tower?
The County Courthouse
The County Courthouse replaced one the 1925 earthquake wrecked, and it ran far over budget; a lucky oil strike just up the coast in 1928 brought in the tax money that covered the difference.
Q 16Which downtown theater, built in 1924 and restored in 2008, is the Santa Barbara Symphony's home?
The Granada Theatre
The Granada Theatre opened in 1924 inside an eight-storey block billed as Santa Barbara's only skyscraper; the 2008 rebuild gave the Symphony the wider stage opening and better acoustics it had asked for before moving in.
Q 17Which oil field near Santa Barbara did a Japanese submarine shell in February 1942?
Ellwood
Ellwood came under fire from the deck gun of the submarine I-17 at dusk on 23 February 1942; the shells did little more than damage a pier and a derrick, but the raid set off invasion fears along the whole West Coast.
Q 18The 1969 Santa Barbara oil spill began with a blowout on Platform A, run by which company?
Union Oil
Union Oil's crew was pulling out the drill bit on 28 January 1969 when the well blew out; the oil that fouled the channel and its beaches for months helped inspire the first Earth Day, held in April 1970.
Q 19Outraged Santa Barbara locals answered the 1969 oil spill by forming a group with which acronym?
GOO
GOO stood for Get Oil Out; formed within days of the blowout, it ran a petition to clear the rigs from the channel and mailed little flasks of oil scooped off the beach to politicians.
Q 20Which Santa Barbara festival, founded in 1924, is held every August?
Fiesta
Fiesta, officially Old Spanish Days, began in August 1924 as a party for the opening of the rebuilt Lobero Theatre; the businessmen who organized it wanted an annual event that would draw visitors.
An Australian seaman
An Australian seaman gave the seedling to a local girl in 1876; she planted it on State Street, and after she left, her friend moved it in 1877 to its present spot beside what is now the Amtrak station.
Q 24The Santa Barbara Bowl's original 1936 stage, undermined by a flood within a few years, could do what?
Revolve
It could revolve: the Santa Barbara Bowl was built in 1936 to stage the pageant of the city's summer festival, but floodwater wrecked the turning stage within a few years and its replacement stayed fixed.
Q 25Which former warehouse district by Santa Barbara's waterfront is now known for wine-tasting rooms and breweries?
The Funk Zone
The Funk Zone sits in old industrial buildings between Highway 101 and the beach: artists covered the warehouses in murals, and winemakers and brewers turned them into the tasting rooms that draw the crowds today.
Q 26What is the mascot of the University of California, Santa Barbara?
The Gaucho
The Gaucho replaced the Roadrunner in a student vote in the mid-1930s; the usual story is that women students, taken with Douglas Fairbanks in the 1927 film The Gaucho, led the push.
Q 27Which kind of surplus military base did UC Santa Barbara take over for its seaside campus?
A wartime Marine air station
A wartime Marine air station trained Pacific-bound squadrons on the Goleta mesa from 1942 to 1946; when the college moved out there in 1954 it had two new buildings, and everything else, dormitories included, was the Marines' old barracks.
Q 28Rancho del Cielo, in the mountains above Santa Barbara, was the vacation retreat of which president?
Ronald Reagan
Ronald Reagan did much of the ranch work himself, fence-building included; he hosted Queen Elizabeth II there in 1983 and later welcomed Mikhail Gorbachev as well.
Q 29Which Channel Island, visible from Santa Barbara, is the largest island in California?
Santa Cruz Island
Santa Cruz Island is California's largest island at about 96 square miles; feral pigs left over from its ranching days drew golden eagles that nearly wiped out its cat-sized native fox, until both pigs and eagles were cleared off.
Q 30Which unincorporated community between Santa Barbara and Summerland is known for its celebrity estates?
Montecito
Montecito was discovered around 1890 by well-to-do Easterners, who built winter estates there for the mild climate; it has never become a city, so the county still runs it.