Aranjuez
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40 free Aranjuez trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Aranjuez is a small town south of Madrid with an outsized place in Spanish history. For centuries it was a spring retreat of the Spanish court, laid out with a riverside palace, miles of gardens and tree-lined avenues, and it gave its name to one of the best-loved pieces of twentieth-century music. This quiz turns the best Aranjuez fun facts into questions: the kings and queens who built and furnished the palace, the odd animals and collections they kept there, the uprising that changed who sat on the throne, the treaties signed in its halls, and the concerto, films and plays that carry the town's name around the world. It is written for travellers planning a day trip from Madrid, for music lovers who know the melody but not the place, and for anyone who enjoys Spanish history with a few surprises. Every answer comes with a short explanation.
30 of 40 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01A heritage steam train from Madrid to Aranjuez is named after which fruit, handed out to passengers during the ride?
Strawberries
Strawberries from Aranjuez's market gardens once rode to the capital on this line, which opened in 1851 as only the second railway on the Iberian Peninsula.
Q 02The Concierto de Aranjuez, inspired by the Spanish royal palace gardens, is a concerto for which solo instrument?
Guitar
Guitar was an instrument its composer never played: he was a pianist, and this was the first work he wrote for it with an orchestra.
Q 03Which exotic animals roamed the royal estate at Aranjuez from the 1580s, grazing freely and working as beasts of burden?
Dromedaries
Dromedaries, about ten in 1583, had multiplied to some 200 by the 18th century and even survived an enemy army's occupation of the palace in 1710.
Q 04Which jazz trumpeter reworked the slow movement of the Concierto de Aranjuez for his 1960 album Sketches of Spain?
Miles Davis
Miles Davis's version came out without the composer's permission; he was irate at first, then accepted that jazz had carried his concerto to a far wider public.
Q 05Which Spanish composer, blind since childhood, wrote the Concierto de Aranjuez and is buried in the town's cemetery?
Joaquín Rodrigo
Joaquín Rodrigo lost his sight to diphtheria at three and wrote his music in Braille; in 1991 the king made him Marquess of the Gardens of Aranjuez.
Q 06Aranjuez stands on the left bank of which river, the longest in the Iberian Peninsula?
Tagus
Tagus water runs about 1,000 km from eastern Spain to the Atlantic at Lisbon, and at Aranjuez it was channelled into the canals and market gardens of the royal estate.
Q 07A games room in Aranjuez's royal palace, finished in 1765, has walls and ceiling lined entirely with which material?
Porcelain
Porcelain plaques from Madrid's Buen Retiro factory are screwed to wooden walls and moulded with Chinese-style figures, monkeys, parrots and dragons.
Q 08A popular myth says the mournful adagio of the Concierto de Aranjuez laments the 1937 bombing of which Basque town?
Guernica
Guernica has nothing to do with it: the composer's wife wrote that the movement recalls the happy days of their honeymoon and his grief at the loss of their first pregnancy.
Q 09Until a king relaxed the rule in 1752, which people alone were allowed to live in the town of Aranjuez?
Royalty and nobility
Royalty and nobility had the place to themselves, along with their palace servants; ordinary visitors had to find a bed in nearby towns such as Ocaña.
Q 10Which Spanish king, builder of the monastery of El Escorial, declared Aranjuez a Royal Site in 1560?
Philip II
Philip II hired the same two architects for both projects, and set aside the fertile land north of the river for kitchen gardens and farming.
Q 11Which royal favourite, titled Prince of the Peace, was seized by a mob in the 1808 Mutiny of Aranjuez?
Manuel Godoy
Manuel Godoy, a former royal guardsman who rose to run Spain, was found hiding in an attic; his fall is re-enacted in the town's streets every year.
Q 12Which prince became king of Spain when the 1808 Mutiny of Aranjuez forced his father to abdicate?
Ferdinand VII
Ferdinand VII held the crown for only weeks: Napoleon lured father and son to Bayonne, made both renounce it and gave Spain to his own brother.
Q 13The Arab Room made for a 19th-century queen in Aranjuez's royal palace copies a hall of which Andalusian monument?
The Alhambra
Q 21Which Spanish city heard the world premiere of the Concierto de Aranjuez in 1940, a month before Madrid did?
Barcelona
Barcelona's Palau de la Música Catalana staged it on 9 November 1940, with Regino Sainz de la Maza, to whom the concerto is dedicated, as soloist.
Q 22Which flamenco star, who could barely read music, learned the Concierto de Aranjuez in 1991 and delighted its composer?
Paco de Lucía
Paco de Lucía put rhythmic accuracy ahead of the polished tone classical players prize, and the composer declared that nobody had played the piece so brilliantly.
Q 23In which 1996 British film about a colliery band do the players nickname the Concierto de Aranjuez 'Orange Juice'?
Brassed Off
The Alhambra's Hall of the Two Sisters was the model for its brightly coloured plasterwork; the room served mainly as a smoking room for men.
Q 14The 1801 Treaty of Aranjuez confirmed Spain's return of which vast North American territory to Napoleon's France?
Louisiana
Louisiana was traded for a new Italian kingdom for the Spanish king's son-in-law; two years later Napoleon sold the territory to the United States.
Q 15In the 1779 Treaty of Aranjuez, France secretly agreed to fight Britain until Spain recovered which territory?
Gibraltar
Gibraltar never fell, despite a siege of more than three years; the secret clause tied American independence to it without Congress knowing.
Q 16A 1777 treaty signed at Aranjuez fixed the border between French and Spanish colonies on which Caribbean island?
Hispaniola
Hispaniola is still divided partly along that line: the northern and southern ends of the border between Haiti and the Dominican Republic follow the 1777 boundary.
Q 17The Spanish king toppled at Aranjuez in 1808 filled the royal palace there with his prized collection of which objects?
Clocks
Clocks of every size stand in almost every hall, because the king was a keen amateur clockmaker as well as a collector.
Q 18Aranjuez's Mariblanca fountain shows which Roman goddess rising from the water with a dolphin at her feet?
Venus
Venus took the place of a king's statue in the early 1760s; her nickname is said to come from her likeness to the Mariblanca statue in Madrid.
Q 19One old theory traces the name Aranjuez to a Latin phrase meaning the altar of which Roman god?
Jupiter
Jupiter's altar, Ara Jovis in Latin, was a Benedictine scholar's idea; the theory most widely accepted instead points to a Basque word for hawthorn.
Q 20The Concierto de Aranjuez was written in 1939 not in Spain but in which foreign capital, where its composer had studied?
Paris
Paris was where he had trained under the composer Paul Dukas; he wrote the concerto there as the Spanish Civil War was ending and a wider war loomed.
Brassed Off features the adagio arranged for flugelhorn and band, recorded by the real Grimethorpe Colliery Band, whose own pit-closure story inspired the plot.
Q 24Which jazz pianist opens his much-played composition Spain with the adagio theme of the Concierto de Aranjuez?
Chick Corea
Chick Corea used the melody as a slow introduction before his own tune takes off, and singer Al Jarreau kept the same opening in his vocal version.
Q 25Which woodwind instrument introduces the slow melody of the Concierto de Aranjuez over soft chords from the soloist?
Cor anglais
Cor anglais, the oboe's deeper cousin, sings the tune first; the composer called the whole movement a dialogue between the soloist and solo wind instruments.
Q 26Which German director turned Peter Handke's play The Beautiful Days of Aranjuez into a film that competed at Venice?
Wim Wenders
Wim Wenders set it not in Spain but in a summer garden in France, where a man and a woman simply sit and converse all day; Handke himself plays the gardener.
Q 27Which German playwright set the opening act of his tragedy Don Carlos in the royal gardens of Aranjuez?
Friedrich Schiller
Friedrich Schiller set the play at the court of the king who founded royal Aranjuez, and Verdi later turned it into his opera Don Carlos.
Q 28Which queen of Spain opened the Madrid–Aranjuez railway in 1851, having given some of her own land for its terminus?
Isabella II
Isabella II presided over an opening party for more than a thousand guests, paid for entirely by the line's promoter, the Marquis of Salamanca.
Q 29Aranjuez's ornate railway station of the 1920s, decorated with mosaics, was built in which revival style?
Neo-Mudéjar
Neo-Mudéjar brick and tile revive the Moorish-influenced craft of medieval Spain; in the main hall, mosaics spell out MZA, the initials of the railway company that built it.
Q 30Which celebrated Italian castrato directed the operas and firework spectacles of the Spanish court at Aranjuez?
Farinelli
Farinelli once lit a show with 60,000 candles, and the king had a house at Aranjuez enlarged to serve as the singer's own residence.