Lisbon Trivia
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49 free Lisbon trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Lisbon is Europe's second-oldest capital, was flattened on All Saints' Day 1755 and rebuilt on a grid by a marquis who tested his buildings with marching soldiers. This quiz covers that history: the Ulysses legend, Roman garum, the Moors and Alfama, Afonso Henriques in 1147, the 1497 conversion decree, Vasco da Gama's departure, Drake's failed attack, the 1640 restoration, the court's flight to Rio and the Carnation Revolution. The landmarks follow: Belém Tower and its architect, the Jerónimos tombs and their custard tarts, the Monument to the Discoveries, São Jorge Castle, the Santa Justa lift, the two Tagus bridges, Cristo Rei, the Oceanário and Expo '98. Then fado and saudade, the americanos trams, the metro's colours, Benfica's 38 titles, Sporting, the Estádio da Luz finals, Pessoa's café and the Bairro Alto. Easy questions ask which river the city stands on and which club has two European Cups; hard ones want the Norwegian crusader king who seized the city and the year Sporting reached 20 titles. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on the city and its landmarks, and each question carries the sentence that supports it. Try our Portugal and Madrid quizzes next.
30 of 49 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which saint, born in Lisbon and honoured there with a June festival, is named for an Italian city?
Anthony of Padua
Anthony of Padua was baptised Fernando in Lisbon and took the name Anthony only when he became a Franciscan friar; Padua is where he died and is buried.
Q 02Lisbon's Museu Nacional do Azulejo celebrates which art form seen on façades across the city?
Painted ceramic tiles
Painted ceramic tiles. The museum fills a convent founded by Queen Leonor in 1509, and one long tile panorama there shows Lisbon as it stood before the 1755 earthquake.
Q 03According to a persistent legend repeated by classical authors, Lisbon was founded by which mythical hero?
Ulysses
Ulysses. Roman writers respelled the town's old name, Olisipo, as Ulyssippo to fit the tale, though where the name really comes from is unknown.
Q 04Which sour-cherry liqueur is a Lisbon speciality, sold by the shot at its own dedicated bars?
Ginjinha
Ginjinha. Regulars order it com elas or sem elas, with or without the soaked cherries in the glass, at tiny bars like the one a Galician named Espinheira opened in the 19th century.
Q 05Which king took Lisbon from the Moors in 1147 with the help of crusader knights?
Afonso Henriques
Afonso Henriques won the city after a siege of about four months, helped by crusaders bound for the Holy Land; one of them, Gilbert of Hastings, stayed on as Lisbon's bishop.
Q 06Lisbon replaced which city as the capital of medieval Portugal?
Coimbra
Coimbra. The older capital later won something back: Portugal's first university, founded in Lisbon, moved between the two cities and settled in Coimbra for good in the 16th century.
Q 07King Sigurd's crusaders, who won a battle at Lisbon on their way to Jerusalem, had sailed from which kingdom?
Norway
Norway. Sigurd I's sixty ships fought their way down the Iberian coast, and his saga calls Lisbon 'half Christian and half heathen' before the fleet sailed on to the Holy Land.
Q 08Which Lisbon quarter, the city's oldest, kept its medieval maze of lanes because the 1755 earthquake largely spared it?
Alfama
Alfama. Under Moorish rule it was the whole of Lisbon, and only later did the city spread west onto the low ground that the earthquake wrecked.
Q 09The great earthquake that destroyed Lisbon in 1755 struck on the morning of which feast?
All Saints' Day
All Saints' Day. Many people were in church for the holy day and died when the buildings fell; a tsunami and fires across the city then completed the ruin.
Q 10Which philosopher answered the 1755 Lisbon earthquake with a poem attacking the belief that all is for the best?
Voltaire
Voltaire. His 'Poem on the Lisbon Disaster' mocked the comfort that whatever is, is right, and he later sent the hero of Candide through the same earthquake.
Q 11Which minister of Joseph I rebuilt Lisbon after 1755 and gave his name to its grid-planned lower town?
The Marquis of Pombal
The Marquis of Pombal is credited, perhaps wrongly, with the order to bury the dead and care for the living; he then cleared the ruins for a grid of straight streets instead of rebuilding the medieval town.
Q 12Lisbon's rebuilt lower town is anchored by two great squares: the Praça do Comércio and which other?
Praça do Rossio
Praça do Rossio. Its official name is Praça de Dom Pedro IV, after the king whose statue tops the column at its centre, but the older name Rossio is the one that stuck.
Q 13Vasco da Gama's fleet left Lisbon in 1497 and rounded which cape to reach India by sea?
Q 21Which landmark commissioned by King John V came through Lisbon's 1755 earthquake almost undamaged?
The Águas Livres Aqueduct
The Águas Livres Aqueduct. Its arches stride more than 200 feet above the Alcântara valley, yet they stood while the convent, the palace and the opera house in the city below were wrecked.
Q 22Lisbon's 25 de Abril Bridge was inaugurated in 1966 under what name?
Ponte Salazar
Ponte Salazar, after the dictator who ordered it built. A railway deck planned from the start was left out of the 1966 bridge and did not open until 1999.
Q 23The 25 de Abril Bridge takes its current name from the date of which event?
The Carnation Revolution
Cape of Good Hope
The Cape of Good Hope. Bartolomeu Dias had rounded it in 1488 and gone no farther; da Gama pressed on across the Indian Ocean and reached Calicut in May 1498.
Q 14Lisbon's Belém Tower is a showpiece of which exuberant 16th-century style?
Manueline
Manueline. Its stonework is carved with ropes, anchors and armillary spheres, celebrating the sea voyages whose spice trade paid for such buildings.
Q 15Belém Tower bears a carving of which animal, landed in Lisbon in 1515 and drawn by Dürer from hearsay?
A rhinoceros
A rhinoceros, the first seen alive in Europe since Roman times. The king sent it on as a gift to the Pope, but it died in a shipwreck off the coast of Italy.
Q 16Which poet, who celebrated da Gama's voyage in The Lusiads, is entombed beside him at the Jerónimos Monastery?
Luís de Camões
Both were moved to carved tombs in the nave in 1880; da Gama's men had prayed on the site the night before sailing in 1497.
Q 17Belém's Monument to the Discoveries first went up as a temporary showpiece for which event?
The 1940 Portuguese World Fair
The 1940 Portuguese World Fair. That version was plaster on a light frame and was pulled down; the stone monument seen today went up in 1960, 500 years after Henry the Navigator's death.
Q 18Which Lisbon religious house is credited with first making the pastel de nata custard tart?
The Jerónimos
The Jerónimos. Facing closure after the 1820 revolution, its monks sold the tarts through a nearby sugar refinery, whose owners took on the recipe and opened the Pastéis de Belém bakery in 1837.
Q 19Fado, Lisbon's music of loss and resignation, shares its name with the Portuguese word for what?
Fate
Fate. The songs are thought to have grown up among Lisbon's sailors, dock workers and tavern-goers, and in 2011 UNESCO listed fado as part of humanity's intangible cultural heritage.
Q 20Which Portuguese word, meaning longing or a sense of irreparable loss, sums up the mood of fado?
Saudade
Saudade. Its best-known voice was Amália Rodrigues, the 'Queen of Fado'; when she died in 1999, Portugal declared three days of national mourning.
The Carnation Revolution. Hardly a shot was fired on 25 April 1974, and the name came from Celeste Caeiro, a restaurant worker who handed carnations to the soldiers in the street.
Q 24The Treaty of Lisbon, signed in the city in 2007, changed the rules of which organisation?
The European Union
The European Union. The treaty rescued much of a constitution that French and Dutch voters had rejected in 2005, and its Article 50 set out how a member state could leave, the clause later used for Brexit.
Q 25Which Expo '98 attraction, built on a pier in an artificial lagoon, still draws about a million visitors a year?
The Oceanário
The Oceanário. Its four habitat tanks ring one vast central tank and are arranged to look like part of it, so that visitors seem to gaze into a single ocean.
Q 26Which birds flank the ship on Lisbon's coat of arms, in legend the guardians of St Vincent's body?
Ravens
Ravens. In the legend they kept scavengers off the martyr's body, and the arms show the ship that carried his relics from the Algarve to Lisbon in the 12th century.
Q 27Lisbon's Cristo Rei statue was built in thanksgiving for what?
Portugal being spared World War II
Portugal being spared World War II. The country's bishops pledged the monument at Fátima in 1940 as a plea to be kept out of the war, and it was inaugurated in 1959.
Q 28Which Lisbon club won the European Cup in both 1961 and 1962?
Benfica
Benfica. In the 1962 final Ferenc Puskás scored a hat-trick for the Spanish champions and still lost 5-3, as the young Eusébio struck twice for the Lisbon side.
Q 29Before Cristiano Ronaldo, which graduate of Sporting's Lisbon academy won the Ballon d'Or, in 2000?
Luís Figo
Luís Figo. He joined Sporting's academy at 12, and his world-record move from Barcelona to their fiercest rivals in 2000 so angered Barça fans that a pig's head was later thrown at him.
Q 30In 2014 Lisbon's Estádio da Luz staged the first Champions League final between two clubs from which city?
Madrid
Madrid. Atlético led until Sergio Ramos headed Real level in the 93rd minute, and Real ran away with extra time to win 4-1 and claim 'La Décima', their tenth European Cup.