Mexico City Trivia
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59 free Mexico City trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Mexico City is the oldest capital in the Americas and one of only two founded by Indigenous peoples: the Mexica built Tenochtitlan on an island in Lake Texcoco around 1325, Cortes razed it in 1521 and rebuilt on the same grid, and the lake was drained so thoroughly that the city has been sinking into its bed ever since. This quiz covers that arc, from the eagle-and-cactus prophecy and Moctezuma's meeting with Cortes to New Spain, the Grito, the Boy Heroes of Chapultepec, Maximilian's palace, the 1968 Olympics and the Tlatelolco massacre, and the 1985 earthquake. Then it does the modern megacity: 16 boroughs and 22 million people at 2,240 metres, the Zocalo and its flag, the cathedral and the Templo Mayor found by electricity workers in 1978, the pictogram Metro, Xochimilco's trajineras and axolotls, Chapultepec's grasshopper hill and its castle, the Angel of Independence and its extra steps, Bellas Artes' Tiffany curtain and four-metre sink, Frida Kahlo's Blue House and Trotsky's murder in Coyoacan, the Basilica of Guadalupe's 20 million pilgrims, the Azteca's two World Cup finals, lucha libre masks, Day of the Dead and the city that once had the world's worst smog. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on Mexico City and its landmarks, districts and events, and each question shows the sentence that supports it. Our Mexico quiz covers the rest of the country.
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Q 01What nickname do Mexicans use for people from Mexico City?
Chilangos
Chilangos. Elsewhere in Mexico the word often carries a sneer, and though some residents dislike being called it, many now use it of themselves with humour or ease.
Q 02In Aztec legend, an eagle perched on which plant marked the spot to build Tenochtitlan?
A cactus
A cactus. The eagle on its prickly pear sits at the centre of Mexico's flag today, and the Mexica who found the sign on a marshy lake island built their capital outwards from it.
Q 03Which active volcano near Mexico City has a Nahuatl name meaning 'Smoking Mountain'?
Popocatépetl
Popocatépetl. 'El Popo' stands about 70 km southeast of the capital and woke in 1994 after decades of quiet; its ash has since grounded flights at Mexico City's airport more than once.
Q 04The Aztecs drove Cortés's army out of Tenochtitlan in 1520 in a rout known by what name?
La Noche Triste
La Noche Triste, the 'sad night'. Many of Cortés's men drowned beside the causeway out of the city, dragged under by the gold they had loaded themselves with.
Q 05Which last Aztec emperor, a successor of Moctezuma II, surrendered Tenochtitlan to Cortés in 1521?
Cuauhtémoc
Cuauhtémoc. He held the city through a siege of about three months, and Cortés, fearing a revolt, later took him on a march to Honduras and had him hanged on the way.
Q 06Which disease, new to the Americas, swept through Tenochtitlan in 1520 before Cortés's final siege?
Smallpox
Smallpox. It reached Mexico with the Spanish and killed much of the Aztec leadership, while the invaders, raised in a country where the disease was common, were largely spared.
Q 07Mexico City sits about 2,240 metres up; which of these capitals stands even higher?
Bogotá
Bogotá. Colombia's capital stands at about 2,640 metres, some 400 metres above Mexico City, while Santiago, for all its Andean backdrop, lies little more than 500 metres up.
Q 08Which Mexico City borough honours the president who outlasted Maximilian?
Benito Juárez
Benito Juárez. He kept his republican government alive by retreating north to the US border, returned once the French army left, and has the city's main airport named after him too.
Q 09On the UN's 2018 list, which urban area in the Americas outranked Greater Mexico City?
Sao Paulo
Sao Paulo. The UN put it at about 21.7 million people against Greater Mexico City's 21.6 million, a gap of barely 70,000, with both far ahead of New York's 18.8 million.
Q 10Why is Mexico City sinking?
Groundwater is over-pumped from the old lake bed
Groundwater is over-pumped from the old lake bed, so the clay underneath compresses and cracks. The Spanish drained the lakes the city once lived on, which left wells as its main water supply.
Q 11Until a 2016 reform renamed it Ciudad de México, the capital was officially called what?
The Federal District
The Federal District. Residents had called their home 'el DF' for decades, and the change set the capital on the road to its own constitution and powers close to those of a state.
Q 12Mexico City's main square, formally the Plaza de la Constitución, is better known as what?
The Zócalo
The Zócalo. The word means 'plinth': in 1843 a grand commemorative column was planned for the middle of the square, only its base was ever laid, and the nickname stuck.
Q 13Which Mexico City landmark took almost 250 years to build, from 1573 to 1813?
The Metropolitan Cathedral
Q 21Which Mexico City skyscraper, opened in 1956, came through the great earthquakes of 1957 and 1985 undamaged?
Torre Latinoamericana
Torre Latinoamericana. Its engineers drove hundreds of piles some 33 metres into the city's soft clay and set the steel frame on a foundation designed to float in the mud.
Q 22Mexico City's deadly earthquakes of 1985 and 2017 had what in common?
The same calendar date
The same calendar date, 19 September. The 2017 quake struck about two hours after the yearly drill held to mark 1985, and a third big one hit Mexico on that very date in 2022.
Q 23To guide non-readers, each Mexico City Metro station has its own what?
Pictogram
The Metropolitan Cathedral. So many generations of architects worked on it, from Claudio de Arciniega to Manuel Tolsá, that it mixes Gothic, Baroque and Neoclassical styles in one building.
Q 14Electricity workers digging in Mexico City in 1978 struck a carved stone disc that revealed which buried Aztec temple?
The Templo Mayor
The Templo Mayor. The disc, more than three metres wide, shows the dismembered goddess Coyolxauhqui, and the find set off a full excavation of the temple, which now has its own museum.
Q 15The name Chapultepec means what in Nahuatl?
Grasshopper hill
Grasshopper hill. Aztec rulers kept a retreat on the hill and sent its spring water into Tenochtitlan along an aqueduct.
Q 16Chapultepec Castle was the residence of Maximilian I during which period?
The Second Mexican Empire, 1864-67
The Second Mexican Empire, 1864-67. Maximilian had the old military academy rebuilt as his palace; after his fall Mexico's presidents moved in, and it is now the National Museum of History.
Q 17The cadets who died defending Chapultepec Castle against US troops in 1847 are remembered as what?
Los Ninos Heroes
Los Ninos Heroes. Legend has it that the last of them, Juan Escutia, wrapped himself in the Mexican flag and leapt from the castle walls so that it could not be captured.
Q 18Paseo de la Reforma, laid out for Emperor Maximilian, is often likened to which Paris avenue?
The Champs-Elysees
The Champs-Elysees. The drive was first known as the Promenade of the Empress, Maximilian's wife Carlota; after he was shot the republicans dropped the name, and in 1872 it took that of their liberal Reform.
Q 19Mexico City's sinking ground has forced the city to add 14 steps to the base of which monument?
Angel of Independence
Angel of Independence. The soft ground troubled it from the start: in 1906 the half-built column had to be pulled down and begun again on new foundations after the first ones failed.
Q 20The Palacio de Bellas Artes has a stage curtain made of nearly a million pieces of glass by which firm?
Tiffany's of New York
Tiffany's of New York. Its glass forms a view of the Valley of Mexico with two volcanoes at the centre, made for a theatre that was begun in 1904 but, stalled by revolution, opened only in 1934.
Pictogram. Lance Wyman, fresh from designing the 1968 Olympics graphics, based the first ones on each stop's name or surroundings, so that riders can know Candelaria station simply as 'the duck'.
Q 24Which Oscar-winning 2018 film is named after the Mexico City neighbourhood where its director grew up?
Roma
Roma. Alfonso Cuarón drew the drama from his own 1970s childhood in the district, told it through the family's live-in housekeeper, and won the Oscar for Best Director with it.
Q 25Visitors to Xochimilco ride the canals in colourful boats called what?
Trajineras
Trajineras. The flat-bottomed boats were once everyday transport across the lake; now each carries a name, often a woman's, on its painted arch, and boatloads of musicians float alongside playing for the passengers.
Q 26What is a chinampa?
An artificial island for farming
An artificial island for farming. Farmers built each plot up on the shallow lake from reeds, mud and plants, and the 'floating gardens' of the nickname are today firmly rooted islands.
Q 27Which critically endangered salamander, famous for regrowing limbs, is native to the lakes of Xochimilco?
The axolotl
The axolotl. Urban sprawl, polluted water and introduced carp and tilapia have pushed it close to extinction in the wild, even as laboratories and pet shops around the world keep it in large numbers.
Q 28The Frida Kahlo Museum in Mexico City is nicknamed La Casa Azul because of what?
Its cobalt-blue walls
Its cobalt-blue walls. Kahlo was born in the house and died there, and her husband then gave it away to become her museum, which opened a year after his own death.
Q 29Which exiled Russian revolutionary was murdered in his Mexico City house in 1940?
Leon Trotsky
Leon Trotsky. He had survived a machine-gun raid on the house three months earlier; then a Soviet agent who had charmed his way into the household struck him with an ice axe.
Q 30Cortés governed New Spain from which lakeside town, now a Mexico City borough, while the capital was rebuilt?
Coyoacán
Coyoacán. Cortés made his home and set up a town council here in 1521, running the colony from the lakeshore until the new Mexico City had risen on Tenochtitlan's rubble.