Grenoble
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40 free Grenoble trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Grenoble sits where two rivers meet at the foot of the French Alps, and it likes to call itself the capital of those mountains. It is a city with a few surprises: a provincial town whose street protest helped start a revolution, an Olympic host that changed how the Games were staged and watched, and a research hub with roots in 19th-century industry. This quiz covers the fun facts people most often look up about Grenoble: how the city got its name, what happened when the Winter Olympics came in 1968, which writers, inventors and scientists lived here, what the area is known for at the table, and what locals call the cable car to the old hilltop fort. It is written for travellers planning a visit, students heading to the university, and anyone who enjoys a good city quiz. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so you leave with the story behind each fact.
30 of 40 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01What did Grenoble's townspeople hurl at royal troops from above in 1788, giving the day its name?
Roof tiles
Roof tiles rained down on Louis XVI's soldiers on 7 June 1788, the Day of the Tiles. The revolt led to a provincial assembly that many historians count among the first sparks of the French Revolution.
Q 02Which famous Tour de France symbol was first worn on a 1919 stage that set off from Grenoble?
The yellow jersey
The yellow jersey was first pulled on by Eugène Christophe in Grenoble on 19 July 1919, before a 2 am start for Geneva. A plaque unveiled for the centenary in 2019 marks the spot.
Q 03Which herbal liqueur made by monks shares its name with the mountain range just north of Grenoble?
Chartreuse
Chartreuse has been made by Carthusian monks since 1737, and only a select few of them know the full recipe of 130 plants. Its hue became so familiar that English borrowed the drink's name for the shade in 1884.
Q 04Schuss, the unofficial mascot of Grenoble's 1968 Winter Olympics, was a cartoon figure of what?
Skier
Schuss was a stylised skier in a blue suit with a large red ball for a head, and is counted as the first Olympic mascot. The first official one, Waldi the dachshund, followed at Munich in 1972.
Q 05The royal title Dauphin, taken from the province once ruled from Grenoble, means which animal?
Dolphin
Dolphin is the meaning of Dauphin: the lords of the Dauphiné bore one on their coat of arms. Humbert II sold the province in 1349 on condition that the French heir always carried the title.
Q 06What nickname do locals give the spherical cabins of Grenoble's cable car, in service since 1976?
The bubbles
The bubbles, Les Bulles in French, arrived in 1976 and became a symbol of the city. The line itself opened in 1934, making it one of the oldest urban cable cars anywhere.
Q 07Built on a river plain ringed by three mountain massifs, Grenoble is often described as one of France's what?
Flattest cities
Flattest cities is the surprising label: Grenoble is built on a level river plain about 214 metres up, between three massifs. That makes it unusually easy to get around by bicycle.
Q 08Which nut grown around Grenoble won one of France's first origin labels for a fruit, in 1938?
Walnut
Walnut orchards around Grenoble have carried an appellation d'origine contrôlée since 1938. The Noix de Grenoble area spreads over three departments, mostly along the Isère valley.
Q 09Napoleon marched through Grenoble in 1815 on his way to retake power after escaping which island?
Elba
Elba had held Napoleon for under ten months when he landed in France and headed north. At Laffrey, just outside Grenoble, he walked up to the royal troops sent to arrest him and they joined his cause.
Q 10Which novelist, author of The Red and the Black, was born in Grenoble in 1783 as Marie-Henri Beyle?
Stendhal
Stendhal gave his pen name to Stendhal syndrome, the dizziness he described feeling among the art treasures of Florence in 1817. He spent his childhood in and around Grenoble.
Q 11Which fashion accessory, exported as far as Russia and America, made Grenoble rich in the 1800s?
Gloves
Gloves were Grenoble's signature trade: by 1787 its 64 glovers turned out nearly two million a year. Rival Grasse had faded after Protestant craftsmen left France when the Edict of Nantes was revoked.
Q 12Which fortress above Grenoble, reshaped by General Haxo in the 1800s, is reached by cable car?
The Bastille
The Bastille shares its name with the Paris prison but was built to guard France's Alpine frontier. It is the Grenoble area's main tourist site, drawing about 600,000 visitors a year.
Q 13Grenoble's 1968 Winter Olympics were the first Olympic Games that TV viewers could watch how?
In colour
Q 21Which Roman emperor gave Grenoble its name when the Gallic town of Cularo was renamed for him?
Gratian
Gratian visited Cularo and raised it to the rank of a city, which was renamed Gratianopolis in 381. Centuries of sound changes wore that down to Graignovol and finally Grenoble.
Q 22Which decipherer of Egyptian hieroglyphs was schooled in Grenoble and later taught history there?
Jean-François Champollion
Jean-François Champollion arrived in Grenoble aged ten to live with his elder brother and became a professor there at just 19. A lycée in the city now carries the Champollion name.
Q 23Which Grenoble-born inventor built a mechanical duck that seemed to eat and digest grain?
In colour is how Grenoble 1968 went out, a first for any Olympics. The same Games brought the first Winter Olympic drug tests and saw East and West Germany enter separate teams.
Q 14Which French leader came to Grenoble in November 1944 to honour its part in the Resistance?
Charles de Gaulle
Charles de Gaulle made Grenoble a Companion of the Liberation, an honour given to only five French communes. Free French broadcasts on the BBC had already dubbed it the capital of the Maquis.
Q 15Grenoble is the biggest metropolis in the Alps, ahead of which Austrian host of two Winter Games?
Innsbruck
Innsbruck staged the Winter Games in 1964 and 1976, either side of Grenoble's own in 1968. The two Alpine cities have been twinned since 1963.
Q 16In 1987 Grenoble became the second French city, after Nantes, to bring back which street transport?
Tramways
Tramways returned to Grenoble 35 years after the last old line closed in 1952. The new low-floor cars were the first in the world that wheelchair users could board unaided.
Q 17Grenoble's ice hockey club is the Brûleurs de Loups, a name meaning the burners of which animals?
Wolves
Wolves give the Brûleurs de Loups their name, which the club founded in 1963 as Grenoble Hockey Club adopted only in 1992. The team plays in the Ligue Magnus, the top tier of French ice hockey.
Q 18At the opening of Grenoble's 1968 Winter Olympics, helicopters dropped 30,000 scented paper what?
Roses
Roses are Grenoble's emblem: three red ones on gold fill the city's coat of arms and also featured in the 1968 Games logo. The paper flowers fell alongside 500 small Olympic flags on parachutes.
Q 19Grenoble belongs to which French region, formed by a 2016 merger and governed from Lyon?
Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes
Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes came into being on 1 January 2016, when two older regions were joined, and takes in twelve departments. Grenoble is the prefecture of one of them, Isère.
Q 20Which Frenchman swept all three men's alpine gold medals at the 1968 Winter Olympics in Grenoble?
Jean-Claude Killy
Jean-Claude Killy won the downhill, giant slalom and slalom, the last only after rival Karl Schranz was disqualified on appeal. He left the Games as their most successful athlete.
Jacques de Vaucanson
Jacques de Vaucanson hid ready-made droppings inside the duck, so the digestion was a trick. His lasting work was an automated loom of 1745, whose ideas Jacquard later perfected.
Q 24Which mathematician, famous for his series, studied heat while Napoleon's prefect in Grenoble?
Joseph Fourier
Joseph Fourier ran the Isère department from Grenoble for more than a decade, overseeing road building while he worked out how heat spreads. He is also credited with first describing the greenhouse effect.
Q 25Near Grenoble, engineer Aristide Bergès popularised the phrase 'white coal' for which energy source?
Hydropower
Hydropower from mountain torrents drove Bergès's paper mills, and he made the phrase famous at the Paris Exposition of 1889. Grenoble celebrated the industry with an international exhibition in 1925.
Q 26Grenoble's Perret Tower of 1925 is billed as Europe's first tower built from which material?
Reinforced concrete
Reinforced concrete was still a novelty when architect Auguste Perret used the tower to show what it could do. It is the only structure left from the city's 1925 exhibition.
Q 27Which massif southwest of Grenoble became a short-lived 'free republic' of the Resistance in 1944?
Vercors
Vercors fighters, about 4,000 strong, declared their republic after D-Day, but some 10,000 German troops overran the plateau that July. Its cliffs face Grenoble from the massif's eastern edge.
Q 28Which yearly EU title did Grenoble hold in 2022, after Lahti and before Tallinn?
European Green Capital
European Green Capital rewards a city's environmental record, and Stockholm was the first winner in 2010. Grenoble had cut the speed limit to 30 km/h on most of its streets in 2016.
Q 29The Museum of Grenoble was the first museum in France to open its collections to what?
Modern art
Modern art entered the museum under Andry-Farcy, its curator from 1919 to 1949, a decade before New York's Museum of Modern Art opened in 1929.
Q 30Grenoble's ESRF, a ring-shaped research machine opened in 1994, makes some of the brightest what?
X-rays
X-rays from the European Synchrotron are 100 billion times brighter than a hospital's, letting scientists study proteins and fossils in fine detail. A neighbouring institute, the ILL, probes matter with neutrons instead.