Lesser Antilles
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50 free Lesser Antilles trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
The Lesser Antilles curve for hundreds of miles from the Virgin Islands down to Trinidad, a chain of volcanic peaks and low coral islands that separates the Caribbean Sea from the open Atlantic. Few places pack so many flags, languages and stories into so little land, and neighbouring islands can differ in language, currency and even the side of the road they drive on. This quiz starts with the geography: which island is which, the capitals, the volcanoes, and how the Leeward and Windward groups got their names. It also covers the history of colonies traded between European powers, the people the islands have produced, and the music, food and wildlife that set each one apart. It is written for geography fans, travellers, students and quiz hosts. Most questions can be worked out with a little thought, a few are for island specialists, and every answer comes with a short explanation.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In 1804 the Royal Navy officially commissioned Diamond Rock, a steep islet off Martinique, as what?
A warship
The rock became a warship, the sloop HMS Diamond Rock, after sailors hoisted cannon to its summit. Its guns harassed French shipping for 17 months.
Q 02Which island lost its capital, Plymouth, to eruptions of the Soufrière Hills volcano that began in 1995?
Montserrat
Montserrat is nicknamed the Emerald Isle of the Caribbean for the Irish ancestry of many islanders, and it keeps St Patrick's Day as a public holiday.
Q 03Which Founding Father of the United States was born in Charlestown on the island of Nevis?
Alexander Hamilton
Alexander Hamilton was born out of wedlock, orphaned as a child and taken in by a prosperous merchant.
Q 04The 'mountain chicken', hunted as a delicacy on two Lesser Antilles islands, is actually what kind of animal?
A frog
The mountain chicken is a frog, one of the largest in the world. Hunting and a fungal disease have left it critically endangered.
Q 05Which island of only 87 square kilometres has been divided between France and the Netherlands since 1648?
Saint Martin
Saint Martin was split by the Treaty of Concordia. The smaller Dutch side, Sint Maarten, has more people than the French side.
Q 06Which island, the easternmost in the Caribbean, replaced its monarchy with a president to become a republic in 2021?
Barbados
Barbados made the switch on 30 November 2021, the 55th anniversary of its independence, and stayed in the Commonwealth.
Q 07Which British royal accepted a plot of land on the private island of Mustique as a wedding present in 1960?
Princess Margaret
Princess Margaret was given the ten-acre plot by the island's owner, Colin Tennant, and built a villa there called Les Jolies Eaux.
Q 08Which volcano on Martinique destroyed the town of Saint-Pierre within minutes in May 1902?
Mount Pelée
Mount Pelée killed about 29,000 people in the worst volcanic disaster of the 20th century. The main eruption left only three known survivors.
Q 09From which country did the United States buy the islands of St Thomas, St John and St Croix in 1917?
Denmark
Denmark sold the islands for $25 million in gold. Washington feared that Germany might seize them as a submarine base.
Q 10Which British tycoon was married in 1989 on Necker Island, his private retreat in the British Virgin Islands?
Richard Branson
Richard Branson later offered Necker Island as collateral for a loan to keep his airline, Virgin Atlantic, flying during the pandemic.
Q 11Which pop star, born in Saint Michael and raised in Bridgetown, was declared a National Hero of her island in 2021?
Rihanna
Rihanna, born Robyn Rihanna Fenty, grew up in a three-bedroom bungalow and helped her father sell clothes at a street stall.
Q 12Which Caribbean island gives its name to a liqueur, often dyed blue, flavoured with dried laraha peel?
Curaçao
Curaçao liqueur relies on the laraha, a bitter orange that adapted to the island's conditions. The famous blue is only dye.
Q 13Which island, called the Island of Spice for its nutmeg, was invaded by US-led forces in Operation Urgent Fury?
Grenada
Grenada got its first nutmeg trees in 1843, when a merchant ship bound for England from the East Indies left a few behind.
Q 21Which people of mixed African and Carib descent were deported by the British from Saint Vincent to Roatán in 1797?
Garifuna
Only about half of the Garifuna deportees lived to reach Roatán, and the survivors spread along the coast of Central America as far as Belize and Nicaragua.
Q 22Which music genre did Lord Shorty create in Trinidad in the 1970s to revive the fading popularity of calypso?
Soca
Soca was defined by its creator as the Soul of Calypso, and he first spelled the word sokah.
Q 23Which dance music was pioneered in the early 1980s by Kassav', a band from the French Antilles?
Zouk
Zouk began as a fast carnival sound, later nicknamed zouk béton, before an offshoot called zouk-love appeared.
Q 14Which island, home to the Boiling Lake and the Kalinago Territory, is known as the Nature Island of the Caribbean?
Dominica
Dominica is the youngest island in the Lesser Antilles and is still being formed by volcanic activity. Its Boiling Lake is the world's second-largest hot spring.
Q 15Which island, fought over 14 times by Britain and France, has the twin volcanic peaks called the Pitons?
Saint Lucia
Saint Lucia changed hands so often that it was nicknamed the Helen of the West, after Helen of Troy. It is named after Saint Lucy of Syracuse.
Q 16La Grande Soufrière, the highest peak in the Lesser Antilles, stands on which butterfly-shaped island?
Guadeloupe
Guadeloupe's two main islands form the wings of the butterfly, separated by a narrow channel, and the active volcano rises to 1,467 metres.
Q 17Which British admiral gives his name to the Georgian naval dockyard at English Harbour in Antigua?
Horatio Nelson
Horatio Nelson lived at the dockyard from 1784 to 1787. It is the only continuously working Georgian-era dockyard in the world.
Q 18After the Bounty mutiny, William Bligh's second voyage carried which Tahitian food plant to Saint Vincent?
Breadfruit
Breadfruit was wanted as a cheap, high-energy food for enslaved workers in British colonies. Bligh's first attempt to fetch it had ended with the mutiny.
Q 19Which musical instrument grew out of Carnival percussion bands in Trinidad during the 1930s and 1940s?
Steelpan
The steelpan evolved from earlier traditions such as tamboo bamboo and was declared the national instrument of Trinidad and Tobago in 1992.
Q 20The Duchy of Courland, which founded a colony on Tobago in 1654, lay in which present-day Baltic country?
Latvia
Latvia's Duchy of Courland had only about 200,000 people, making it the second-smallest state ever to colonise the Americas.
Q 24Which Nobel Prize-winning author of A House for Mr Biswas was born in Chaguanas, Trinidad, in 1932?
V. S. Naipaul
V. S. Naipaul was the son of a Trinidad Guardian reporter. He was knighted in 1990 and took the literature prize in 2001.
Q 25Which Martinique-born psychiatrist backed Algerian independence and wrote The Wretched of the Earth?
Frantz Fanon
Frantz Fanon joined the Algerian National Liberation Front and dictated the book in Tunis shortly before his death in 1961.
Q 26Tobago's Main Ridge, set aside by a law of 1776, is one of the world's oldest protected examples of what?
A forest reserve
It is a forest reserve, kept uncleared after an MP spent eleven years persuading Parliament that the trees would attract rain to the island's plantations.
Q 27Which cocktail bitters, sold in a bottle with a famously oversized label, is produced in Trinidad and Tobago?
Angostura
Angostura bitters are named after the town on the Orinoco River where they were first made, and they contain no angostura bark.
Q 28Rhum agricole, the rum style of Martinique and the French Caribbean, is distilled from what instead of molasses?
Fresh cane juice
Rhum agricole is made from fresh cane juice, squeezed straight from the stalks. Most rum uses molasses, a by-product of sugar refining.
Q 29Which Portuguese-based creole, shaped by Dutch and Spanish, is the most widely spoken language on Aruba and Bonaire?
Papiamento
Papiamento is spelled with a final u on Bonaire, and it is largely based on Portuguese as spoken in the 15th and 16th centuries.
Q 30Codrington Lagoon on Barbuda holds a vast nesting colony of which seabird, whose males inflate a red throat pouch?
Frigatebird
The frigatebird colony sits on tiny Man of War Island at the north of the lagoon, the largest saltwater lagoon in the Eastern Caribbean.