Auckland
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49 free Auckland trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Sep 2026.
Auckland is the city with a harbour on two oceans, 53 volcanoes under its suburbs, the world's largest Polynesian population and a nickname, City of Sails, earned by a boat in one of every three households. It was New Zealand's capital for a quarter century before losing the job to Wellington, and it has been the country's biggest city almost ever since. These 49 questions cover the lot: Tāmaki Makaurau, the Earl whose name it carries and the Durham village behind his title, William Hobson and the Ngāti Whātua land gift, the Fencibles, the Irish settlers, kauri gum exports and the 1865 capital move. Then geography and sport: the isthmus, Rangitoto's eruption, the Harbour Bridge, Spaghetti Junction, Eden Park, the Warriors, the Breakers and three America's Cups in the Viaduct. The hard tier asks about the 1939 snow on Mount Eden, Kipling's poem, Heinlein's Venus colony and the forklift that blacked out Northland. Every answer is cited to a page we checked, with a short explanation so you learn something either way. Play it solo or print it for a Kiwi quiz night.
30 of 49 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Auckland lies on which of New Zealand's islands?
North Island
North Island. About one in three New Zealanders lives in the Auckland region, and at the 2023 census the urban area alone outnumbered the whole South Island.
Q 02What is the Māori-language name for Auckland?
Tāmaki Makaurau
Tāmaki Makaurau. It is often translated as 'Tāmaki desired by many' or 'Tāmaki of a hundred lovers', because so many tribes prized the isthmus for its fertile soil and waterways.
Q 03Auckland is popularly known by which nickname?
City of Sails
City of Sails. The city straddles an isthmus between two harbours, and it has hosted yachting's America's Cup three times, in 2000, 2003 and 2021.
Q 04Which city replaced Auckland as New Zealand's capital in 1865?
Wellington
Wellington. Members of Parliament could not agree on a more central capital, so the choice was handed to three commissioners from Australia, who picked the harbour town on Cook Strait.
Q 05Auckland was named after which British statesman?
George Eden
George Eden. As First Lord of the Admiralty the Earl of Auckland had headed the navy in which the city's founder served as a captain; by 1840 he was Governor-General of India.
Q 06West Auckland, the English village behind the city's name, won 'the first World Cup' in which sport?
Football
Football. A village team made up mostly of coal miners won the Sir Thomas Lipton Trophy in Turin in 1909, a tournament later dubbed the first World Cup, then went back in 1911 and beat Juventus 6-1 in the final.
Q 07Which Lieutenant-Governor, fresh from signing the Treaty of Waitangi, chose Auckland as capital?
William Hobson
William Hobson. He put the government there over protests from southern settlers, wanting it near the main Māori and British populations, and he died in office in 1842.
Q 08Which iwi, later known for occupying Bastion Point, offered land for the new capital?
Ngāti Whātua
Ngāti Whātua. Their chief Āpihai Te Kawau, wary of attack by musket-armed northern rivals, invited the governor to settle on the isthmus in 1840.
Q 09Which region held New Zealand's capital before Auckland?
Northland
Northland. The first capital, at Okiato in the Bay of Islands, served for barely a year, and the abandoned settlement burned down in 1842.
Q 10What did Māori once haul overland across Auckland's narrow isthmus at Ōtāhuhu?
Canoes
Canoes. Waka were dragged over portages such as Te Tō Waka at Ōtāhuhu, where only about a kilometre of land separates the east coast from the west.
Q 11Auckland's southern harbour opens west onto which sea?
Tasman Sea
Tasman Sea. Shifting sandbars guard the entrance, and when HMS Orpheus struck them in 1863, 189 of the 259 aboard drowned in New Zealand's worst shipwreck.
Q 12Māori terraced many of Auckland's volcanic cones to build what?
Fortified villages
Fortified villages. From about 1600 tribes ringed the cones with terraces and palisades to form pā, and the earthworks still show on many of the field's 50-odd volcanoes.
Q 13Which volcano produced the most recent eruption in Auckland's field, about 600 years ago?
Rangitoto
Rangitoto. It is the only eruption in the field that people saw: those living on neighbouring Motutapu left footprints that the eruption preserved.
Q 21What nickname do Aucklanders give the Central Motorway Junction, where State Highways 1 and 16 meet?
Spaghetti Junction
Spaghetti Junction. The name was borrowed from the tangled Gravelly Hill interchange in Birmingham, England, which opened in 1972 and has lent its nickname to knotted interchanges around the world.
Q 22Which stadium is home to Auckland's Blues Super Rugby side?
Eden Park
Eden Park. The ground began as a swamp that was drained for cricket in the early 1900s, and New Zealand's first Test cricket win came there in 1956, against the West Indies.
Q 23Which NRL club plays its home games at Auckland's Mt Smart Stadium?
New Zealand Warriors
Q 14Auckland's 328-metre Sky Tower was built as the centrepiece of what kind of complex?
Casino
Casino. SkyCity's tower met early scepticism and mocking nicknames when it rose in 1997, yet it has come to define the city's skyline.
Q 15Auckland's 1959 bridge to the North Shore crosses which harbour?
Waitematā
Waitematā. Traffic so outran the forecasts that four more lanes were hung off the bridge's sides in 1969; prefabricated in Japan, they were nicknamed the 'Nippon clip-ons'.
Q 16Auckland has more people of which group than any other city?
Polynesians
Polynesians. Large-scale migration from the Cook Islands, Niue and other Pacific islands began in the 1950s, just as thousands of young Māori were leaving rural districts for the city's wages.
Q 17Agents of which country sank the Greenpeace ship Rainbow Warrior in Auckland's harbour in 1985?
France
France. The ship was about to lead a protest flotilla to the nuclear test site at Mururoa; the bombs killed photographer Fernando Pereira, and two captured agents exposed the plot.
Q 18At the 2023 census, the largest group of overseas-born Aucklanders came from which region?
Asia
Asia. About one Aucklander in five was born there, more than double the share born in the Pacific Islands, although the city is famed for its Pacific communities.
Q 19At the 2023 census, which Pacific language was most spoken in Auckland?
Samoan
Samoan. About 75,000 people in the Auckland region spoke it, 4.5% of residents, which put it well ahead of te reo Māori at 2.6%.
Q 20Auckland's international airport is in which southern suburb?
Māngere
Māngere. The airport opened in 1966 to replace the air force field at Whenuapai that had served as the city's airport, and much of its runway sits on land reclaimed from the harbour.
New Zealand Warriors. They have played in Australia's premier rugby league competition since 1995, and players of Pacific Island heritage have long been at the heart of the side.
Q 24Which basketball team plays most of its home games at Auckland's Spark Arena?
New Zealand Breakers
New Zealand Breakers. Founded in 2003 to play in Australia's National Basketball League, they won the title three seasons running from 2011 to 2013.
Q 25Which part of Auckland's waterfront was rebuilt in the 1990s to host the America's Cup?
Viaduct Basin
Viaduct Basin. After Team New Zealand won the Cup at San Diego in 1995, the city's old fishing harbour was redeveloped for the defence in 2000, and restaurants and superyachts followed.
Q 26Who was elected the first mayor of Auckland's amalgamated 'super city' council in 2010?
Len Brown
Len Brown. The Manukau mayor beat Auckland City's John Banks to lead a single council that replaced seven city and district councils and a regional council.
Q 27Dove-Myer 'Robbie' Robinson, Auckland's longest-serving mayor, made his name fighting a plan to pipe what into the sea off the city?
Raw sewage
Raw sewage. In the late 1940s he led the campaign against discharging the city's untreated waste, then won approval for oxidation ponds to break it down naturally, and the fame carried him to the mayoralty in 1959.
Q 28What name was given to the retired British soldiers settled in villages around Auckland in the 1840s to defend it?
Fencibles
Fencibles. The word is a Scots form of 'defensible', and each man signed on for seven years at posts such as Howick in return for a cottage and an acre of land.
Q 29Early Auckland drew an unusually large share of its settlers from which country?
Ireland
Ireland. Counts of the Irish share of the young town run from nearly a third in 1851 to about half, well above the share in the mainly English settlements further south.
Q 30Kauri gum, dug from old forest land and once among Auckland's main exports, was shipped overseas chiefly to make what?
Varnish
Varnish. Makers in London and America judged the hardened resin superior to its rivals from the mid-1840s, so Māori and settlers dug it from ground where ancient kauri forests had stood.