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50 free Tampa trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
49 free Tampa trivia questions with answers. Tampa is a city built by a railroad tycoon, a cigar baron and a pirate who never existed. This quiz covers all three, plus everything that came after: Fort Brooke at the mouth of the Hillsborough River, Henry Plant's minaret-topped hotel, Vicente Martinez Ybor's factories, the invented legend of Jose Gaspar and the krewe that still storms the city every January. The sports half runs from the Buccaneers' 0-26 start and their two Super Bowls to the Lightning's back-to-back Cups, the Rays' hurricane-forced move across the bay, the Big Sombrero and the pirate ship at Ray Jay. There are questions on Busch Gardens, the Sunshine Skyway, MacDill's two combatant commands, Tampa International's driverless people movers, Bern's wine cellar, the Columbia Restaurant, the TECO streetcar and, of course, whether salami belongs on a Cuban sandwich. About a third of the questions are ones any local should get; the rest reward people who read historical markers. Every answer is checked against Wikipedia or an official source, and the sentence that establishes it appears under each question.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Fort Brooke, the 1824 army post Tampa grew up around, stood at the mouth of which river?
Hillsborough
Colonel George Mercer Brooke arrived with four companies of the 4th Infantry from Pensacola. The fort closed in 1883, just as the railroad arrived.
Q 02The earliest written form of the city's name, in the memoirs of a shipwrecked Spaniard, was spelled how?
Tanpa
Hernando de Escalante Fontaneda spent years among Florida's native peoples in the 1500s. One theory links the name to a Calusa word; another to a Creek word meaning 'close to'.
Q 03Tampa is the third-most-populous city in Florida, behind which two?
Jacksonville and Miami
The 2020 census counted 403,364 people in the city proper, but the wider Tampa Bay metro of 3.4 million is Florida's second largest.
Q 04Besides 'Cigar City', Tampa's best-known nickname is 'The Big' what?
Guava
A local columnist coined it in the 1970s as a play on New York's Big Apple, and the name stuck to a fruit that grows wild around the bay.
Q 05Henry B. Plant's 1891 railroad hotel is now the main building of which institution?
University of Tampa
Plant's railroad had reached the town only eight years earlier. The hotel cost more than $3 million, had 511 rooms and stretched a quarter of a mile.
Q 06How many silver minarets crown the Moorish Revival roofline of the old Tampa Bay Hotel?
Six
They share the skyline with four cupolas and three domes. Babe Ruth signed his first contract in the hotel's Grand Dining Room and hit his longest home run at the field next door.
Q 07Which colonel and his Rough Riders were quartered at the Tampa Bay Hotel in 1898 before sailing for Cuba?
Theodore Roosevelt
Tampa was the army's embarkation port for the invasion, and generals used the hotel as their base of operations.
Q 08In 1885 Tampa persuaded cigar maker Vicente Martinez Ybor to move his factories from which city?
Key West
Ybor City's first cigars were rolled in 1886, and within about twenty years the depressed village had become a bustling city.
Q 09At its 1929 peak, roughly how many cigars a year were rolled in Ybor City?
500 million
That output earned Tampa the title 'Cigar Capital of the World'. Workers were read to by a paid lector as they rolled.
Q 10Ybor City's immigrant cigar workers came mainly from Cuba, Spain and which other country?
Italy
Most of the Italians came from Sicily, and around 60% from a single village, Santo Stefano Quisquina. Their mutual aid societies offered free clinics and libraries.
Q 11In 2008 which Ybor City street was named one of the '10 Great Streets in America'?
Seventh Avenue
La Setima is the district's main commercial strip, lined with brick cigar-era buildings; the whole neighbourhood is a National Historic Landmark District.
Q 12Ybor City's Columbia Restaurant, Florida's oldest, calls itself the world's largest restaurant for which cuisine?
Spanish
Fifteen dining rooms seat 1,700 people, flamenco dancers perform most nights, and the Hernandez-Gonzmart family has run it for five generations.
Q 13Which meat, absent from the Miami version, is traditionally layered into a Tampa Cuban sandwich?
Genoa salami
Q 21By winning Super Bowl LV in 2021, the Buccaneers became the first NFL team to win one where?
At their home stadium
Tom Brady, in his first season in Tampa, took the game's MVP award, and the pirate ship's cannons fired for real.
Q 22What 103-foot structure at Raymond James Stadium fires cannons when the Buccaneers score?
A replica pirate ship
The steel-and-concrete ship weighs 43 tons. The stadium opened in 1998 and is also home to the USF Bulls.
Q 23Raymond James Financial, holder of the Buccaneers' stadium naming rights, is headquartered in which city?
St. Petersburg
The addition is credited to Ybor City's Italian immigrants. The rest is ham, roast pork, Swiss cheese, pickles and mustard on Cuban bread, pressed flat.
Q 14In which year did Tampa's City Council name the Cuban Sandwich the city's signature sandwich?
2012
The sandwich most likely emerged before 1900 in cafes serving cigar workers in Tampa or Key West, and the Tampa-Miami argument over salami has never been settled.
Q 15Since 2005 the Gasparilla Pirate Festival parade has been held on the last Saturday of which month?
January
The first parade was actually held in May 1904, staged by a group of businessmen who dubbed themselves Ye Mystic Krewe of Gasparilla.
Q 16The Jose Gasparilla II pirate ship that 'invades' Tampa each year is actually what kind of vessel?
A steel barge
It is towed into the harbour by a flotilla of hundreds of private boats while the krewe fires cannons at the city.
Q 17When the pirates land during Gasparilla, what do they demand from Tampa's mayor?
The key to the city
The mayor always surrenders it, and the krewe then leads a parade of floats down Bayshore Boulevard for a crowd of around 300,000.
Q 18Ye Mystic Krewe of Gasparilla modelled itself on the krewes of which other city's celebration?
New Orleans' Mardi Gras
Jose Gaspar himself is pure Florida folklore: no contemporary record of the pirate exists.
Q 19The Tampa Bay Buccaneers began play in 1976 and lost how many consecutive games before their first win?
26
They went 0-14 in year one and did not win until the 13th week of their second season, all in creamsicle orange.
Q 20The Buccaneers won their first Super Bowl, XXXVII, by routing which team 48-21?
Oakland Raiders
Coach Jon Gruden had been the Raiders' head coach the season before, and the Bucs picked off five passes against the league's top offense.
Locals shorten the name to 'Ray Jay'. Capacity is 69,218 for most events and about 75,000 for the biggest ones.
Q 24Before Super Bowl LV, Raymond James Stadium had already hosted which two Super Bowls?
XXXV and XLIII
That is the Ravens-Giants game of 2001 and the Steelers-Cardinals thriller of 2009. The stadium also staged the 2017 College Football Playoff final.
Q 25What was the nickname of Tampa Stadium, the Buccaneers' original home, demolished in 1999?
The Big Sombrero
It opened in 1967, hosted Super Bowls XVIII and XXV, and was briefly renamed Houlihan's Stadium in its final years.
Q 26Super Bowl XXV at Tampa Stadium in 1991 ended with the Giants beating the Bills by what score?
20-19
Scott Norwood's last-second field goal sailed wide right, the first of Buffalo's four straight Super Bowl defeats.
Q 27Which goaltender became the first woman in a major North American pro league with Tampa Bay in 1992?
Manon Rhéaume
The Lightning played their first regular-season game that October at Expo Hall on the state fairgrounds, beating Chicago 7-3.
Q 28Which Hall of Fame centre fronted the ownership group that won Tampa an NHL expansion franchise in 1990?
Phil Esposito
The Lightning began play in 1992-93 and lifted their first Stanley Cup in 2004.
Q 29After their 2004 title, the Lightning won back-to-back Stanley Cups in which two years?
2020 and 2021
They reached three straight Finals from 2020 to 2022, with Nikita Kucherov and captain Steven Stamkos leading the way.
Q 30Under what name did Tampa Bay's Major League Baseball team begin play in 1998?
Devil Rays
The 'Devil' was dropped after 2007, and the shortened name now nods to both the fish and Florida's sunshine. The team reached the World Series in 2008 and 2020, losing both.