Urban Trivia
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128 free Urban trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This urban trivia quiz is about cities as cities: which are biggest, oldest, highest, coldest, windiest and most crowded; who founded them and when; what they were called before; how their subways, bridges, towers and squares came to be; and where the nicknames come from. It ranges from Uruk and Jericho to Jakarta and Dhaka, from Vatican City to Chongqing, from the first Tube line to the busiest station on Earth. If you want American cities specifically, our US cities quiz covers those. The easy questions are ones most travellers can answer: what Tokyo used to be called, which country is a city inside Rome, why the Big Apple is the Big Apple. Then it climbs: which city moved 29 times before settling, which capital sits inside a national park, what Bangkok's full ceremonial name is like, why Wellington and Reykjavík hold their records, and which brand-new capitals replaced Rio, Yangon and Almaty. Every answer was checked against the encyclopaedia entry for the city or subject before publishing, and the sentence that supports it is stored with each question.
30 of 128 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01A megacity is usually defined as an urban area with more than how many people?
10,000,000
A megacity is an urban area of more than 10,000,000 people; Tokyo, Delhi and Shanghai are textbook examples, and the UN counted about 33 such areas in its 2025 report.
Q 02Which urban area did the UN list as the world's largest megacity in 2025?
Jakarta
Greater Jakarta held over 40 million people in 2025; satellite sources point instead to China's Pearl River Delta.
Q 03Which city is widely considered the most densely populated built-up urban area in the world?
Dhaka
Dhaka is the world's densest major urban area, packing well over 20,000 people per square kilometre across its built-up area; the UN put its 2025 population near 37 million.
Q 04Which Chinese municipality is the largest 'city proper' in the world, at roughly the size of Austria?
Chongqing
Chongqing municipality covers about 82,000 square kilometres, close to Austria's area, and holds some 32 million people, many of them in rural counties far from the city centre.
Q 05Which city served as the US capital for the decade before Washington took over in 1800?
Philadelphia
Philadelphia was the temporary US capital from 1790 to 1800 under the Residence Act, while the new federal city of Washington was being built on the Potomac.
Q 06Which Mesopotamian city do most archaeologists consider the first true city?
Uruk
Uruk, in southern Mesopotamia, is usually called the first true city; around 3100 BC it may have housed 50,000 people behind walls that legend credits to Gilgamesh.
Q 07Which was the first city to pass one million inhabitants?
Rome
Rome is generally credited as the first city to reach one million inhabitants, around the reign of Augustus in the late first century BC.
Q 08Which city is described as the oldest capital city in the world?
Damascus
Damascus has been settled since at least the third millennium BC and is usually called the oldest continuously inhabited capital; its name also gave English the fabric word damask.
Q 09Excavations at Jericho found more than 20 successive settlements, the first dating back how far?
11,000 years
The earliest of Jericho's 20-plus settlement layers dates back about 11,000 years, to roughly 9000 BCE, near the start of the Holocene.
Q 10The Bible calls Jericho the city of what?
Palm trees
Deuteronomy 34:3 calls Jericho 'the city of palm trees', a name recalling the date palms of its oasis in the Jordan Valley.
Q 11The Neolithic proto-city of Çatalhöyük is in which modern country?
Turkey
Çatalhöyük lies in Turkey, on the Konya Plain of central Anatolia, where it flourished around 7000 BC with several thousand residents living in tightly packed mud-brick houses.
Q 12Mohenjo-daro, built around 2500 BCE, belonged to which civilisation?
Indus Valley
Mohenjo-daro, in Pakistan's Sindh province, was a major city of the Indus Valley civilisation around 2500 BCE; its Sindhi name means Mound of the Dead Men.
Q 13Which was the largest city in the pre-Columbian Americas?
Tenochtitlan
Tenochtitlan, the Aztec capital on an island in Lake Texcoco, held some 200,000 people when the Spanish conquered it in 1521, rivalling the biggest European cities of the day.
Q 21The state ruled by the pope is the only country with a population below what?
1,000
Vatican City has fewer than 1,000 residents, about 880 in 2024; every other country, starting with Tuvalu at roughly 10,000, has many times more.
Q 22Which is the world's most densely populated sovereign state?
Monaco
Monaco squeezes about 38,000 people into roughly 2 square kilometres, nearly 19,000 per square kilometre, the highest density of any sovereign state; it is also the second-smallest country.
Q 23Which family has ruled the principality on the French Riviera since 1297?
Grimaldi
The Grimaldi family has held Monaco since François Grimaldi seized its fortress disguised as a monk in 1297; the Monte Carlo casino, opened in 1863, later secured the dynasty's fortune.
Q 14Mexico City is described as one of only two capitals in the Americas founded by whom?
Indigenous peoples
Mexico City began as the Mexica (Aztec) city of Tenochtitlan around 1325; Quito is the only other capital in the Americas founded by Indigenous peoples.
Q 15Which of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World stood at Alexandria?
The Lighthouse
The Lighthouse of Alexandria, on the island of Pharos, was completed under Ptolemy II around 280 BC and stood over 100 metres tall until medieval earthquakes toppled it.
Q 16Which legendary Phoenician queen is said to have founded Carthage?
Dido
Dido, also called Elissa, a princess of Tyre, is the legendary founder of Carthage around 814 BC; Virgil's Aeneid later made her Aeneas's tragic lover.
Q 17Roman myth dates the founding of Rome to roughly which year?
753 BC
Tradition, codified by the scholar Varro, places Romulus's founding of Rome on 21 April 753 BC, the base year of the Roman ab urbe condita dating system.
Q 18Which Roman poet first called Rome 'the Eternal City'?
Tibullus
Tibullus wrote 'urbs aeterna' in his Elegies (2.5) in the first century BC, the earliest surviving use; Ovid and Livy repeated the idea soon after.
Q 19Which is the only existing example of a country lying entirely inside a metropolis?
Vatican City
Vatican City is an enclave entirely surrounded by the city of Rome, the only country lying wholly inside another city; it became sovereign under the 1929 Lateran Treaty.
Q 20How big is the sovereign state ruled by the pope?
44 hectares
Vatican City covers about 44 hectares (0.44 square kilometres, roughly 109 acres); Monaco, the next-smallest sovereign state, is more than four times larger.
Q 24Which region is described as the most densely populated in the world?
Macau
Macau, a former Portuguese colony, packs around 700,000 people into about 33 square kilometres, over 20,000 per square kilometre, the highest density of any country or territory.
Q 25Which region has the most skyscrapers in the world?
Hong Kong
Hong Kong has more buildings over 150 metres than any other city, well over 500 by CTBUH counts, ahead of Shenzhen and New York.
Q 26Britain's 1898 lease on the New Territories ran for how many years?
99
The 1898 Second Convention of Peking leased the New Territories to Britain for 99 years, so the lease expired on 30 June 1997 and all of Hong Kong returned to China.
Q 27Kowloon Walled City reached what density before its 1990s demolition?
1,200,000 per sq km
A 1987 survey found roughly 33,000 people living on just 2.6 hectares, a density of about 1,200,000 per square kilometre, before demolition began in 1993.
Q 28About how many people live in Dharavi, often called one of the world's largest slums?
1,000,000
Dharavi is usually put at around 1,000,000 residents living on roughly 2.4 square kilometres in central Mumbai, one of the most crowded places on Earth.
Q 29The word 'favela' was first used for a slum in which city?
Rio de Janeiro
Soldiers returning from the 1897 Canudos War settled a hill in Rio de Janeiro they called Morro da Favela, after the favela plant of Bahia, and the name spread to all such settlements.
Q 30Which capital has lions and rhinos roaming a national park inside its city limits?
Nairobi
Nairobi National Park, gazetted in 1946, lies only about 7 km from the city centre, so lions and rhinos roam within sight of the skyline; it earned Nairobi the nickname Green City in the Sun.