Flamenco Trivia
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50 free Flamenco trivia questions with answers — music quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Flamenco grew up among the gitano communities of Andalusia and became one of the world's great performing arts, and this quiz covers the whole of it: the song (cante), the guitar (toque), the dance (baile), the rhythms and the people who made them famous. Easy questions ask which region flamenco comes from, what the box drum is called and which UNESCO list it joined in 2010; harder ones dig into the 12-beat compás of the bulerías, the 1922 Granada contest organised by Lorca and Falla, why Camarón de la Isla was nicknamed after a shrimp, and how a Peruvian instrument ended up in every flamenco band. It works for anyone who has watched a tablao show on holiday in Seville or Madrid, for guitar players and dancers, and for music quiz nights that want a round beyond rock and pop. Every answer has been checked against the Wikipedia articles on flamenco, its palos, its instruments and its leading artists, and each question shows its source once you have answered.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Flamenco developed within the gitano subculture of which Spanish region?
Andalusia
Andalusia: there Romani newcomers, Moors and Sephardic Jews lived side by side for centuries, and flamenco grew out of the slow fusion of their music.
Q 02UNESCO's 2010 heritage listing says flamenco is handed down through what?
Families and local clubs
Families and local clubs: the listing credits dynasties, families and flamenco clubs with keeping the art alive, for it began as a private, family affair long before anyone paid to hear it on a stage.
Q 03Which flamenco song of devotion, its name the Spanish for 'arrow', is sung to the floats of Holy Week processions?
Saeta
Saeta: a lone voice, often from a balcony, sings it without accompaniment straight at the statue of Christ or the Virgin being carried through the street below.
Q 04In Spanish, the word 'flamenco' also means a native of which region of northern Europe?
Flanders
Flanders: nobody is sure how the word for a Fleming came to be attached to the music, though one old guess is that the gitanos were taken for northerners, Germans and Flemings being lumped together.
Q 05What are the shouts of encouragement that spur on a flamenco performer called?
Jaleo
Jaleo: the verb behind it, jalear, is also the Spanish for urging on hounds in a hunt, and fellow performers and audience alike do the same for a singer or dancer.
Q 06What is the most serious, deepest class of flamenco song called?
Cante jondo
Cante jondo, 'deep song', deals in death, anguish and despair; its family includes the martinete, born in the blacksmith's forge and sung to nothing but a hammer on an anvil.
Q 07What is the Spanish word for the rhythmic cycle or metre that is fundamental to flamenco?
Compás
Compás comes first in flamenco: melody and harmony matter less than the beat, and a guitarist's first duty is to hold it steady for the singer and the dancer.
Q 08How many beats make up the rhythmic cycle that underlies flamenco's most serious song forms?
12
12: in one common pattern the accents fall unevenly, on beats 3, 6, 8, 10 and 12, so the ear hears two slow threes followed by three quick twos.
Q 09Which fast, festive flamenco form usually brings a gathering to a close?
Bulerías
Bulerías began life as a quick, upbeat tailpiece tacked on to slower songs, and proved so popular that the ending became the main event.
Q 10Alegrías lyrics often mention the Ebro and the Virgen del Pilar, hinting at roots in the jota of which Spanish region?
Aragon
Aragon: the usual account is that the jota took root in Cádiz during the Peninsular War, when the besieged port housed Spain's parliament, and local singers remade it in flamenco rhythm.
Q 11The guajira palo grew out of cultural exchange between Spain and which country?
Cuba
Cuba: guajiras are 'round-trip' songs, born when Spanish music crossed the Atlantic, mixed with the tunes of Cuban country farmers, the guajiros, and sailed home again.
Q 12Which serious flamenco form, said to have given rise to the lighter alegrías, is sometimes called the mother of all the others?
Soleares
Soleares earn the title for the lighter forms said to descend from them, though the name flatters: older song types came before them, and the fandangos were taken over from Spanish folk music.
Q 13What is a flamenco dancer's percussive footwork called?
Zapateado
Zapateado, from zapato, 'shoe': it is the dancer's showpiece, a drum solo played with the feet, and by tradition the man's speciality, while women danced more from the arms and upper body.
Q 21Diego 'El Tenazas' Bermúdez, the elderly surprise winner of Granada's 1922 flamenco contest, is said to have reached the city how?
On foot
On foot: the long-retired singer is reported to have walked for three days from Puente Genil, some hundred kilometres away, and went home with a first prize.
Q 22By the usual account, why did Spanish promoters of the 1920s start billing flamenco shows as 'flamenco opera'?
Opera was taxed less
Opera was taxed less, at 3 per cent against 10 for variety shows, so the story goes that promoters simply renamed their bills; others think the grand title was meant to make flamenco respectable.
Q 23Where was the first academic chair of flamencology founded in 1958?
Q 14Which musical mode, sometimes simply called the flamenco mode, gives the music its distinctive sound?
Phrygian
Phrygian: its second note sits only a semitone above the home note, and falling back through that narrow step is what makes a flamenco guitar run sound so recognisably Spanish.
Q 15In flamenco, what are a guitarist's short melodic passages between the sung verses called?
Falsetas
Falsetas are flamenco's answer to the licks of jazz and blues: guitarists learn them, invent their own and string them together to build a whole solo.
Q 16What is a flamenco singer called?
Cantaor
Cantaor: dancers draw the crowds today, but flamenco began as the singer's art alone, a voice over a beaten rhythm, with the guitar and the dance added later.
Q 17Which flamenco venue takes its name from the Spanish for a boarded stage floor?
Tablao
Tablao: these supper-club stages replaced the old cafés cantantes in the 1960s, when Spain's tourist boom made a nightly flamenco show good business.
Q 18Singer Silverio Franconetti, back from years as a picador in Uruguay, opened the most famous café cantante in which city?
Seville
Seville: cafés like his Café Silverio gave flamenco performers a living for the first time, though many felt the commercial stage watered down the older, graver songs.
Q 19What is the mysterious, ineffable charm or spirit that great flamenco performances are said to have?
Duende
Duende: in everyday Spanish the word means a goblin or household spirit, which is why performers speak of being seized by it rather than of having it.
Q 20Which poet and which composer organised the 1922 deep-song contest in Granada?
Federico García Lorca and Manuel de Falla
Federico García Lorca and Manuel de Falla feared that commercial stage flamenco was killing the old songs, so they held the contest in the gardens of the Alhambra and kept the prize money for amateurs.
Jerez de la Frontera
Jerez de la Frontera: despite the title, the Cátedra was a circle of local scholars rather than a university post, formed three years after an Argentine writer coined the word 'flamencology'.
Q 24The fringed silk shawl swirled by flamenco dancers is named after which Asian port?
Manila
Manila: the shawls reached Spain on the galleons that sailed from the Philippines, but the silk was Chinese, which is why they bloom with Chinese-style flowers and birds.
Q 25Despite their Spanish lyrics, the Gipsy Kings, who took rumba flamenca worldwide with 'Bamboléo', come from which country?
France
France: the band formed in Arles and Montpellier, among the children of Spanish gitano families who had fled across the border during the Civil War.
Q 26"Entre dos aguas", Paco de Lucía's best-known piece, is usually taken to refer to what?
Algeciras, where two seas meet
Algeciras, where two seas meet: his home port has the Mediterranean on one side and the Atlantic on the other. The phrase also means being in two minds, and the tune was improvised to fill out an album.
Q 27Which two guitarists joined Paco de Lucía on the album Friday Night in San Francisco?
John McLaughlin and Al Di Meola
John McLaughlin and Al Di Meola: all but one track was taped in a single night at the Warfield Theatre, and the record went on to sell more than a million copies.
Q 28Paco de Lucía, who never read music fluently, shut himself away to learn which classical work for a 1991 recording?
Rodrigo's Concierto de Aranjuez
Rodrigo's Concierto de Aranjuez: he learned the solo part in seclusion with a classical guitarist as coach, and the composer himself said Paco played it with far more feeling than was normally heard.
Q 29The cajón, now standard in flamenco, was originally an instrument from which country?
Peru
Peru: Paco de Lucía heard one at a diplomat's party in Lima in 1977 and took it home to Spain, where the plain wooden box soon became a fixture of flamenco groups.
Q 30Flamenco 'villancicos', sung by whole families to the growl of the zambomba drum, belong to which time of year?
Christmas
Christmas: villancicos are flamenco carols, and the parties where they are sung are themselves called zambombas, after the friction drum, often just a flowerpot with a skin and a stick, that keeps the beat.