Virginia Beach Trivia
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92 free Virginia Beach trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Virginia Beach is where English America began, at Cape Henry in April 1607, and where a Guinness record for the world's longest pleasure beach now sits. These 41 Virginia Beach trivia questions cover the whole city: the 1963 merger with Princess Anne County that made it Virginia's biggest city, the 1792 Cape Henry Lighthouse that was the new nation's first federal building project, the Battle of the Capes that sealed Yorktown, the Norwegian Lady and the wreck of the Dictator, the Cavalier Hotel, and Edgar Cayce's hospital of dreams. The modern city gets its turn too: the three-mile boardwalk and the 34-foot King Neptune, the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel, NAS Oceana and its Super Hornets, Mount Trashmore, the Virginia Aquarium, Back Bay and First Landing State Park, the East Coast Surfing Championships, the Neptune Festival, and Pharrell Williams's Something in the Water. Locals will find easy questions about the 757; visitors and transplants will meet plenty they did not know. Every answer is checked against Wikipedia and city and park records, and each question shows its source once you answer.
30 of 92 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01After their first landing at Cape Henry in April 1607, where did the English colonists go on to settle?
Jamestown
Jamestown was founded about three weeks later: the colonists' orders were to find a site further inland, safer from the ships of rival European powers.
Q 02In 1963 Virginia Beach merged with which neighbouring jurisdiction to form the present-day city?
Princess Anne
Princess Anne County and the small city of Virginia Beach merged on January 1, 1963, after voters in both approved; the far larger county took the beach town's better-known name.
Q 03In a 2016 referendum, Virginia Beach voters rejected extending which Norfolk light-rail line?
The Tide
The Tide opened in Norfolk in 2011, and Virginia Beach voters backed an extension by more than 60 percent in a 2012 vote before turning it down four years later.
Q 04What did the English colonists raise at Cape Henry on landing in 1607?
A wooden cross
A wooden cross, set up in thanks for a safe passage, gave the landing its memorial: a granite cross has stood near the spot since 1935.
Q 05First Landing State Park was known until 1997 by what name?
Seashore
Seashore State Park, dedicated in 1936, was renamed First Landing in 1997 to mark the spot where the Virginia Company's colonists first came ashore.
Q 06The 1792 Cape Henry Lighthouse holds what distinction in US history?
First federal public works project
First federal public works project: the young government ordered it to guard the mouth of Chesapeake Bay, and the old tower still stands beside its 1881 replacement.
Q 07The old Cape Henry Lighthouse was built of the same Virginia sandstone as which landmark?
The White House
The White House and the lighthouse both drew on Aquia Creek, the quarry behind much of early Washington; the tower served almost a century before an iron successor took over in 1881.
Q 08The 1781 Battle of the Chesapeake off Cape Henry, which doomed Cornwallis, pitted Britain against whom?
The French
The French fleet under the Comte de Grasse drove off Admiral Graves's British ships, so no help could reach Cornwallis by sea.
Q 09The Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel links Virginia Beach to Virginia's Eastern Shore on which peninsula?
Delmarva
Delmarva's Virginia tip could be reached from the south only by ferry until the 17.6-mile crossing opened in 1964.
Q 10Which crossing overtook the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel as the world's longest bridge-tunnel complex in 2018?
Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macau
Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macau repeats the Virginia crossing's trick on a far bigger scale: partway across, the road dives into a tunnel between artificial islands so that ships can pass over it.
Q 11Which base, home to the Atlantic Fleet's strike fighter squadrons, lies inside Virginia Beach?
Naval Air Station Oceana
Naval Air Station Oceana, the Navy's East Coast master jet base, is closed to the public except for one weekend a year, when it stages its September air show.
Q 12The 1781 sea battle off Cape Henry cut off the British army that surrendered weeks later at which Virginia town?
Yorktown
Yorktown fell six weeks after the battle: with the bay closed to British ships, Cornwallis could be neither reinforced nor evacuated, and he surrendered to Washington.
Q 13How was Grace Sherwood, Virginia Beach's 'Witch of Pungo', tested for witchcraft?
Ducked in a river
Q 21Which 'Sleeping Prophet' founded the Association for Research and Enlightenment in 1931?
Edgar Cayce
Edgar Cayce moved to Virginia Beach in 1925 because, he said, a voice in one of his own trances told him to; the association he founded there is still based in the city.
Q 22The Virginia Aquarium opened in 1986 under a different name, as the 'Virginia' what?
Marine Science Museum
Marine Science Museum was the name on the door in 1986, when the exhibits covered only Virginia's rivers, the bay and the nearby ocean; Komodo dragons arrived in 2009.
Q 23Which surf contest has been held in Virginia Beach every summer since 1963?
East Coast Surfing Championships
Ducked in a river, she floated, which by the rule of the day meant guilt; Witch Duck Point is named for the trial, and Virginia's governor pardoned her 300 years later.
Q 14Virginia Beach's Neptune Festival hosts an international championship in what?
Sand sculpting
Sand sculpting is a fixture of the festival's Boardwalk Weekend; the festival also commissioned the bronze Neptune that has stood on the boardwalk since 2005.
Q 15Which Virginia Beach museum stands on the boardwalk at 24th Street, in a station built in 1903?
Surf & Rescue Museum
Surf & Rescue Museum is the current name of the old Seatack life-saving station, whose crews had gone to the aid of a wrecked Norwegian barque in 1891.
Q 16Mount Trashmore Park, opened in 1974, was built on top of what?
A landfill
Mount Trashmore was made by layering compacted solid waste with clean soil over the city's old landfill, turning a dump into a public park with two man-made mountains and lakes when it opened in 1974.
Q 17Which Virginia Beach-born star launched the Something in the Water festival in 2019?
Pharrell Williams
Pharrell Williams launched Something in the Water with the city in April 2019, timing it for College Beach Weekend, a gathering that had drawn years of bad press.
Q 18Where did Chad Hugo first meet the partner with whom he formed the hit production duo The Neptunes?
A summer band camp
A summer band camp in Virginia Beach put the two seventh-graders together, one on drums, the other on tenor saxophone; they went on to produce for Jay-Z, Britney Spears and Nelly.
Q 19The Norwegian Lady statue commemorates the 1891 wreck of which Norwegian barque?
The Dictator
The Dictator ran aground in a storm on March 27, 1891, as guests at a beachfront hotel looked on; her captain survived, but his pregnant wife and four-year-old son drowned.
Q 20An identical twin of Virginia Beach's Norwegian Lady stands in which Norwegian sister city?
Moss
Moss received an identical bronze by sculptor Ørnulf Bast, unveiled the same day in 1962; each Lady appears to gaze across the Atlantic towards her twin.
The East Coast Surfing Championships grew out of a 1962 teenagers' beach party on Long Island, moved south a year later, and is now the world's oldest continuously run surfing contest.
Q 24What was Adam Thoroughgood, later a leading landowner in what is now Virginia Beach, when he first came to Virginia?
An indentured servant
An indentured servant at 17 or 18, Thoroughgood worked off his passage, went home to England and returned with a wife and new settlers; by 1629 he sat in the House of Burgesses.
Q 25Which state park adjoins Back Bay refuge to the south, reaching down to the North Carolina line?
False Cape
False Cape State Park runs six miles along the Atlantic between Back Bay refuge and the North Carolina line; with no public road, visitors arrive on foot, by bike, by boat or on the refuge tram.
Q 26Which area code serves Virginia Beach and the rest of Hampton Roads?
757
757 was split from 804 in 1996; when its numbers ran short, a second code, 948, was laid over the same area in 2022 instead of dividing the region.
Q 27Which nickname does Virginia Beach go by?
The Resort City
The Resort City earns the name along its oceanfront, where hundreds of hotels, motels and restaurants line three miles of boardwalk.
Q 28Which cape, facing Cape Henry across the mouth of Chesapeake Bay, was named for Prince Henry's younger brother?
Cape Charles
Cape Charles honours the prince who became Charles I; the two headlands are known together as the Virginia Capes, and the bridge-tunnel now runs between them.
Q 29Virginia Beach is Virginia's largest city by total area because about half of it is what?
Water
Water covers about half of the city's 497 square miles; by land alone, Virginia Beach ranks only third in the state.
Q 30What climate classification does Virginia Beach have?
Humid subtropical
Humid subtropical, and it shows at First Landing State Park, the northernmost East Coast spot where subtropical and temperate plants grow together.