130 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 130 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
By that measure the UN counted 33 in 2025; other bodies count as many as 42.
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
With about 36.6 million people it is also the second-largest city on the planet.
Q 04Which Chinese municipality is the largest 'city proper' in the world, at roughly the size of Austria?
Chongqing
About 30% of its 30 million people are farmers living in rural areas.
Q 05Which city is the world's most populous national capital?
Beijing
More than 21.8 million residents; Peking was the old romanisation.
Q 06Which Mesopotamian city do most archaeologists consider the first true city?
Uruk
At its peak around 3100 BC it may have housed 50,000 people.
Q 07Which was the first city to pass one million inhabitants?
Rome
Its empire also founded countless colonies on Roman urban principles.
Q 08Which city is described as the oldest capital city in the world?
Damascus
Poetically it is the City of Jasmine, and it gave English the word damask.
Q 09Excavations at Jericho found more than 20 successive settlements, the first dating back how far?
11,000 years
That is around 9000 BCE, almost the start of the Holocene.
Q 10The Bible calls Jericho the city of what?
Palm trees
UNESCO listed Tell es-Sultan in 2023 as the oldest fortified city in the world.
Q 11The Neolithic proto-city of Çatalhöyük is in which modern country?
Turkey
It flourished around 7000 BC on the Konya Plain.
Q 12Mohenjo-daro, built around 2500 BCE, belonged to which civilisation?
Indus Valley
Its name in Sindhi means Mound of the Dead Men.
Q 13Which was the largest city in the pre-Columbian Americas?
Tenochtitlan
It was built on an island in Lake Texcoco and fell to the Spanish in 1521.
Q 14Mexico City is described as one of only two capitals in the Americas founded by whom?
Q 21The state ruled by the pope is the only country with a population below what?
1,000
It came into being through the 1929 Lateran Treaty.
Q 22Which is the world's most densely populated sovereign state?
Monaco
About 38,000 people on 2.08 square kilometres; it is also the second smallest.
Q 23Which family has ruled the principality on the French Riviera since 1297?
Grimaldi
Its casino at Monte Carlo and a rail link to Paris kicked off its 19th-century boom.
Q 24Which region is described as the most densely populated in the world?
Indigenous peoples
It began as Tenochtitlan around 1325 and is the oldest capital in the Americas.
Q 15Alexandria in Egypt was founded in 331 BC by whom?
Alexander the Great
It is nicknamed the Bride of the Mediterranean.
Q 16Which legendary Phoenician queen is said to have founded Carthage?
Dido
It became the capital of a Punic empire that dominated the western Mediterranean.
Q 17Roman myth dates the founding of Rome to roughly which year?
753 BC
The poet Tibullus first called it the Eternal City in the 1st century BC.
Q 18Which Roman poet first called Rome 'the Eternal City'?
Tibullus
Ovid, Virgil and Livy took the phrase up after him.
Q 19Which is the only existing example of a country lying entirely inside a metropolis?
Vatican City
It sits within Rome's boundaries.
Q 20How big is the sovereign state ruled by the pope?
44 hectares
About 109 acres, with a population of around 882 in 2024.
Macau
About 720,000 people on 32.9 square kilometres of former Portuguese colony.
Q 25Which region has the most skyscrapers in the world?
Hong Kong
Britain handed the territory back to China in 1997.
Q 26Britain's 1898 lease on the New Territories ran for how many years?
99
It expired in 1997, when the whole territory was handed to China.
Q 27Kowloon Walled City reached what density before its 1990s demolition?
1,200,000 per sq km
About 33,000 people packed into 2.6 hectares.
Q 28About how many people live in Dharavi, often called one of the world's largest slums?
1,000,000
They share just over 2.39 square kilometres in the middle of Mumbai.
Q 29The word 'favela' was first used for a slum in which city?
Rio de Janeiro
Soldiers back from the Canudos War named it after the favela trees of Bahia.
Q 30Which capital city is the only one in the world with a national park inside its boundaries?
Nairobi
It is nicknamed the Green City under the Sun.