Miami
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49 free Miami trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Sep 2026.
45 free Miami trivia questions with answers. Miami is the only major American city founded by a woman, was named after a lake it does not sit on, and once had a bank-and-newspaper tower repurposed as an Ellis Island for Cuban refugees. It also gave the world pastel cop shows, a perfect NFL season and the busiest cruise port on the planet. This quiz covers the whole city: the founding (Julia Tuttle, the Great Freeze, Flagler's railroad), the neighbourhoods (Little Havana, Wynwood, Coconut Grove, Coral Gables, the Art Deco district), the teams (Heat, Dolphins, Marlins, Inter Miami), the screen (Miami Vice, Scarface, Bad Boys), the music (Will Smith's 'Miami', Ultra, the Calle Ocho conga record), the disasters (the 1926 storm, Andrew) and the oddities (a free elevated train, a January snow flurry, the Miami grid). Easy openers for tourists, hard ones for locals. Use it for a Miami-themed quiz night, a Florida road trip or a test before your first Ultra. Every answer was checked against a documented source and the citation sits under each explanation.
30 of 49 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Who is remembered as the 'Mother of Miami', the only woman to found a major US city?
Julia Tuttle
Julia Tuttle bought the riverfront land the city grew on, then gave away hundreds of acres of it to lure a railroad south. The first train arrived in 1896, and she died just two years later.
Q 02Which railroad tycoon did Miami's founder persuade to extend his Florida East Coast Railway to the city?
Henry Flagler
Henry Flagler, a co-founder of Standard Oil, agreed after the freezes of 1894-95 wrecked crops across Florida but never reached Miami. In return he took hundreds of acres of prime land.
Q 03Which Miami neighbourhood began as 'Colored Town', where deeds confined the city's Black residents?
Overtown
Overtown grew into the hub of Black business and nightlife in the segregated city. It declined from the 1960s, when new expressways were driven straight through the heart of the neighbourhood.
Q 04Miami's name is thought to come from 'Mayaimi', a name Spaniards recorded in the 1500s for which body of water?
Lake Okeechobee
Lake Okeechobee: a shipwrecked Spaniard who spent 17 years among Florida's tribes wrote the name down in his memoir around 1575. It is thought to have passed to the Miami River and then the city.
Q 05Miami's nickname 'The Magic City' came from what?
Its astonishingly fast growth
Its astonishingly fast growth: a settlement of a few hundred voters at incorporation held more than 110,000 residents by the 1930 census. Winter visitors are said to have called the change from one season to the next magic.
Q 06Which singer joined a wedding band called the Miami Latin Boys, which was soon renamed Miami Sound Machine?
Gloria Estefan
Gloria Estefan had fled Cuba with her family as a toddler. In 1975 bandleader Emilio Estefan heard her sing at a wedding his group was playing and asked her to sit in, and they married in 1978.
Q 07Which street is the heart of Little Havana, and lends its name to a March festival?
Calle Ocho
Calle Ocho is Spanish for Eighth Street, the local name for SW 8th Street. Cuban exiles started its festival in 1978 to show their culture to the rest of South Florida, and it now fills 15 blocks.
Q 08In 1988 Little Havana's big March street festival set a Guinness World Record for what?
Longest conga line
Longest conga line: 119,986 people joined it, not long after local band Miami Sound Machine took 'Conga' into the US top ten. The festival is run by the Kiwanis Club of Little Havana.
Q 09Which game do the regulars play all day at Máximo Gómez Park, giving the Little Havana landmark its nickname?
Dominoes
Dominoes games have run there since the early 1970s, over Cuban coffee and cigars. Locals simply call it Domino Park, not by the name of the Cuban independence general it honours.
Q 10Which Miami landmark, modelled on Seville's Giralda, was built in 1925 as a newspaper headquarters?
Freedom Tower
Freedom Tower housed the Miami News until 1957. From 1962 to 1974 the federal government ran its Cuban refugee centre there, which earned the building its nickname, the 'Ellis Island of the South'.
Q 11About 125,000 Cubans reached Florida in a 1980 boatlift named after which Cuban port?
Mariel
Mariel became the exit after some 10,000 Cubans crowded into Peru's embassy in Havana seeking asylum. Fidel Castro then announced that anyone who wanted to leave could go, and boats from Florida came for them.
Q 12Which film follows a Cuban refugee's bloody rise through Miami's 1980s cocaine trade?
Scarface
Scarface was meant to be shot entirely in Miami, but local objections to the way it showed the city and its Cuban exiles drove most of the production to Los Angeles.
Q 13Miami Vice's Sonny Crockett lived on a sailboat with a pet alligator named what?
Elvis
Elvis shared the boat with Don Johnson's detective. Crockett's Ferrari Daytona was really a rebodied Corvette, and once Ferrari objected and supplied two real Testarossas, the fake was blown up on screen.
Q 21Which coach led the Miami Dolphins through a perfect 17-0 season in 1972?
Don Shula
Don Shula's team won all 17 games, the last of them Super Bowl VII, even though quarterback Bob Griese broke his ankle in week five and 38-year-old backup Earl Morrall had to start most of the season.
Q 22Which comedian, the founder of St. Jude Children's Research Hospital, was also a founding owner of the Miami Dolphins?
Danny Thomas
Danny Thomas and lawyer Joe Robbie were awarded the AFL expansion franchise in 1965 for $7.5 million. Thomas sold his share soon afterwards, and Robbie went on running the team until 1990.
Q 23The Marlins took the World Series in 1997 and 2003 despite never having done what?
Won a division title
Q 14By a much-repeated story, NBC's Brandon Tartikoff pitched Miami Vice with a two-word memo reading what?
MTV cops
MTV cops is the legend, but creator Anthony Yerkovich calls it ridiculous and says Tartikoff began telling it over a year after the pitch. His idea grew from laws letting police seize drug dealers' property.
Q 15The executive producer of NBC's Miami Vice imposed which rule on the show's look?
No earth tones
No earth tones: Michael Mann kept reds and browns off screen, so when a script called for a Mercedes, the crew would offer him a white, a black or a silver one. The first season drew 15 Emmy nominations.
Q 16Which director made his feature debut with Bad Boys, the 1995 buddy-cop film set in Miami?
Michael Bay
Michael Bay was directing adverts, including the first Got Milk commercial, when producers Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer hired him. The script had first been developed for comedians Dana Carvey and Jon Lovitz.
Q 17Which rapper's 1998 hit 'Miami' is built on a sample of The Whispers' 'And the Beat Goes On'?
Will Smith
Will Smith's producers wanted a Spanish speaker to say 'Bienvenidos a Miami', so one of them went down to the street outside the studio and asked passers-by until a woman agreed to come up and record it.
Q 18Miami's Ultra Music Festival takes its name from a 1997 album by which band?
Depeche Mode
Depeche Mode's album Ultra gave the festival its name. Its first edition, a 1999 beach party in Miami Beach, drew about 10,000 people and still lost its founders thousands of dollars.
Q 19Ted Arison, the Miami Heat's first owner, made his fortune founding which cruise line?
Carnival
Carnival, which Arison launched after falling out with his partner in an earlier line. His basketball team began less smoothly: it lost its first 17 games, then the worst start in NBA history.
Q 20Where did LeBron James say he was taking his talents?
South Beach
South Beach is actually across the bay in the separate city of Miami Beach, while the Heat play in downtown Miami. James delivered all the same: the team won NBA titles in 2012 and 2013, after its first in 2006.
Won a division title: both champions finished well behind Atlanta and got in as wild cards. After the 1997 win the owner sold off the stars, and the defending champions lost 108 games the next season.
Q 24The Marlins' ballpark in Little Havana stands on the site of which demolished stadium?
The Miami Orange Bowl
The Miami Orange Bowl hosted five Super Bowls and 70 years of University of Miami football. It was pulled down in 2008, once the Hurricanes had left to share the Dolphins' stadium in the suburbs.
Q 25Inter Miami's first major trophy, won weeks after Lionel Messi's 2023 debut, was what?
The Leagues Cup
The Leagues Cup: Miami sat bottom of MLS's Eastern Conference when Messi arrived, yet he finished as the tournament's top scorer and the final, away to Nashville, was won 10-9 on penalties.
Q 26As of 2024, PortMiami held which title among the world's ports?
Busiest cruise port
Busiest cruise port: more than 8.2 million cruise passengers passed through it in 2024. A tunnel under the bay opened in 2014 to keep the port's trucks and cruise traffic off downtown streets.
Q 27In 2002 the fare on Miami's Metromover, the elevated people mover through downtown, was changed to what?
Nothing
Nothing: the 25-cent fare was dropped when voters approved a transit sales tax, partly because collecting the coins cost almost as much as they brought in. The ride has stayed free ever since.
Q 28Which road is the north-south baseline of Miami's street grid, dividing addresses into east and west?
Miami Ave
Miami Ave, known as Avenue D in the city's first years, splits east from west. Because the grid's origin sits downtown beside the bay, the two western quadrants are far larger than the eastern ones.
Q 29Miami's only recorded snow flurries fell the day before which president's 1977 inauguration?
Jimmy Carter
Jimmy Carter was sworn in on January 20, 1977, the day after the flurries. The same cold wave carried wet snow as far south as Homestead and did heavy damage to Florida's citrus and winter vegetables.
Q 30Which porous rock forms the bedrock beneath Miami, laid down when a shallow sea covered the area?
Limestone
Limestone, known locally as Miami oolite, built up from tiny grains of calcium carbonate about 130,000 years ago. It is so permeable that the rock itself holds the aquifer supplying most of the region's drinking water.