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This Santa Barbara trivia quiz has 47 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 47 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 directly behind the city?
The Santa Ynez Mountains
The east-west range tops 4,000 feet, gets a dusting of snow about once every three years and hides the Los Padres National Forest behind it.
Q 03Which Native people lived in at least five villages on the site of Santa Barbara?
The Chumash
The Chumash lived along the channel for millennia; the village of Syuxtun stood near today's waterfront at the foot of Chapala Street, and their sewn-plank canoe was the tomol.
Q 04Which Spanish explorer sailed up the Santa Barbara Channel in 1542 and anchored briefly off the future city?
Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo
Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo, sailing for Spain, entered the channel in October 1542 and anchored off the Chumash coast; the name Santa Barbara was not attached to the channel until 1602.
Q 05Where does Mission Santa Barbara, founded in 1786, fall in the sequence of California missions?
Tenth
Mission Santa Barbara was the tenth of the 21 California missions, dedicated on 4 December 1786 by Padre Fermín Lasuén, who had succeeded Junípero Serra as head of the 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 for its twin-towered, Roman-temple facade, rebuilt in stone after the 1812 earthquake and dedicated in 1820; its archive-library holds records from across the chain.
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 intersections have doglegs?
The 1851 surveyor botched the block measurements
Salisbury Haley laid out the grid in 1851 and got the block sizes wrong, so streets don't quite line up.
Q 09Stearns Wharf, built in 1872, was named after a local businessman in which trade?
Lumber
John Peck Stearns ran a lumber yard and built the wharf in 1872 to land timber and passengers who had previously been rowed ashore through kelp and breakers; it became the longest deep-water pier between Los Angeles and San Francisco.
Q 10Which president visited Santa Barbara in 1891, the first sitting president to do so?
Benjamin Harrison
Benjamin Harrison stopped in Santa Barbara on his April 1891 transcontinental tour, the first sitting president to visit; the railroad had reached the town from Los Angeles in 1887 and Charles Nordhoff's writing had sold it as a health resort.
Q 11The Summerland Oil Field, just east of the city, holds what distinction?
World's first offshore oil drilling
Summerland hosted the world's first offshore oil drilling: from 1896 H. L. Williams and others built piers hundreds of feet into the Pacific to sink wells beneath the seabed.
Q 12Which silent-film studio ran a large lot at State and Mission streets from 1912 to 1921?
Flying A Studios
Flying A Studios, the American Film Manufacturing Company, filmed on two blocks at State and Mission Streets from 1912 to 1921, turning out roughly 1,200 films, of which only about 100 survive.
Q 13Which aerospace giant began life in Santa Barbara, testing a seaplane off the waterfront in 1918?
Q 21Which rule applies to every entry in Santa Barbara's Summer Solstice Parade?
No written words or banners
Entries may carry no written words, logos or banners; the parade, held on the Saturday nearest the June solstice since 1974, also bars motorized vehicles and live animals, and ends at Alameda Park.
Q 22The I Madonnari festival, held each Memorial Day weekend at the Santa Barbara Mission, features what kind of art?
Chalk drawings on asphalt
Chalk drawings on asphalt, in the Italian street-painting tradition, are made in front of the mission and washed away by the first rain.
Q 23Santa Barbara's giant Moreton Bay fig grew from a seedling given in 1876 by whom?
Lockheed
Lockheed began as the Loughead Aircraft Manufacturing Company, founded in Santa Barbara in 1916 by Allan and Malcolm Loughead; their F-1 flying boat flew in 1918, and the brothers later respelled the name to match its pronunciation.
Q 14How many people died in the magnitude 6.3 earthquake of 29 June 1925?
13
It struck at 6:44 a.m., before the streets filled, and the rebuilding cemented the Spanish Colonial style the city is known for.
Q 15Which 1929 building is called 'the most beautiful public building in the United States'?
The County Courthouse
The William Mooser Company designed it in a Spanish-Andalusian castle style; its Sunken Gardens host summer movie nights.
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 on State Street in 1924 inside an eight-storey office block, the tallest building downtown; a full restoration reopened it in 2008 as home of the Santa Barbara Symphony and Opera Santa Barbara.
Q 17Which oil field west of the city did a Japanese submarine shell in February 1942?
Ellwood
The submarine I-17 fired about 16 shells at the Ellwood Oil Field on 23 February 1942, the first foreign attack on the US mainland in World War II; they did roughly $500 of damage to a pier and pump house.
Q 18The 1969 oil spill came from a blowout on Platform A, operated by which company?
Union Oil
Union Oil's Platform A blew out on 28 January 1969, releasing an estimated 80,000 to 100,000 barrels that fouled the coast from Goleta to Ventura; the disaster helped spur NEPA, CEQA and the first Earth Day in 1970.
Q 19Outraged locals responded to the 1969 spill by forming a group with what acronym?
GOO
It stood for Get Oil Out; the spill was the largest in US waters at the time and remains the largest ever off California.
Q 20Which Santa Barbara festival, founded in 1924, is held every August?
Fiesta
Fiesta, officially Old Spanish Days, has run each August since 1924; Flower Girls throw roses to the crowds at Fiesta Pequeña on the Mission steps, and its historical parade is among the largest equestrian parades in the country.
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, the city's outdoor concert amphitheatre, seats roughly how many people?
4,500
It sits in a canyon at the base of the Riviera and hosts about 27 shows a season, booked exclusively by Goldenvoice.
Q 25Which stretch of lower State Street near the beach is known for breweries and wine-tasting rooms?
The Funk Zone
The Funk Zone is the former warehouse district between lower State Street and the beach; from the 2000s its sheds filled with wine-tasting rooms, breweries and galleries along the Urban Wine Trail.
Q 26What is the mascot of the University of California, Santa Barbara?
The Gaucho
The Gaucho has been UCSB's mascot since 1934, when students chose it over the Roadrunner; the campus became part of the University of California in 1944.
Q 27UC Santa Barbara's oceanfront campus was built on the site of what?
A wartime Marine air station
It is the third-oldest campus in the UC system, after Berkeley and UCLA, and was the third host on the ARPAnet.
Q 28Rancho del Cielo, in the mountains above the city, was the vacation retreat of which president?
Ronald Reagan
The 'Western White House' hosted Margaret Thatcher, Queen Elizabeth II and Mikhail Gorbachev, and it's where he signed the 1981 tax cut.
Q 29Which Channel Island, visible from Santa Barbara, is the largest island in California?
Santa Cruz Island
Santa Cruz Island, at about 96 square miles, is California's largest island; it lies roughly 20 miles off Santa Barbara and is split between the National Park Service and The Nature Conservancy.
Q 30Which unincorporated community between Santa Barbara and Summerland is known for its celebrity estates?
Montecito
Montecito, unincorporated and wealthy, lies between Santa Barbara's eastern edge and Summerland; its estates include Ganna Walska's Lotusland garden and the 1925 Casa del Herrero, a National Historic Landmark.