Oaxaca
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50 free Oaxaca trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Oaxaca packs more variety into one corner of the map than most countries manage. Its valleys hold some of the oldest cities in the Americas, its kitchens are famous far beyond its borders, and its villages turn out crafts that collectors recognise at a glance. This quiz turns the best fun facts about Oaxaca into questions: the ruins and the civilisations that built them, the coast and the mountains, the dishes and drinks, the festivals, and the artists, leaders and film stars with roots in the state. It suits travellers planning a trip, students of Spanish and Latin American history, and anyone who has tasted Oaxacan cooking and wants the story behind it. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so you finish knowing more than when you started.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Chapulines, a crunchy Oaxacan snack seasoned with garlic, lime and chili, are which toasted creatures?
Grasshoppers
Grasshoppers get their Mexican name from the Nahuatl word chapolin, and early records of the Spanish conquest already mention people eating them.
Q 02Which vegetable do Oaxaca City carvers turn into elaborate sculptures for a competition held every 23 December?
Radishes
Radishes grown oversized for the event are carved into whole scenes, a contest the city's mayor made official in 1897 to build on a Christmas market custom.
Q 03Which Jack Black comedy about a monastery cook turned masked wrestler was shot entirely in Oaxaca?
Nacho Libre
Nacho Libre is loosely based on Fray Tormenta, a real Mexican priest who wrestled in a mask for 23 years to support the orphanage he ran.
Q 04Which Pixar film turned alebrijes, the fantastical painted creatures carved in Oaxaca, into glowing spirit guides?
Coco
Coco casts Pepita, a winged jaguar-like cat, and Dante, a hairless Xolo dog, in the role; Pixar's researchers stayed with families in Oaxaca while developing the story.
Q 05Which Mexican painter adopted the Tehuana dress of southern Oaxaca as her signature look in self-portraits?
Frida Kahlo
Frida Kahlo favoured the dress of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, whose markets are famously run by women, as a statement of pride in indigenous Mexico.
Q 06Cochineal, a crimson dye that became a prized colonial export of Oaxaca, is made from what?
Dried insects
Dried insects supply the colour: the cochineal is a tiny scale bug, and Oaxacan weavers still use it for their reds.
Q 07Árbol del Tule, a Montezuma cypress near Oaxaca City, holds which world record among trees?
Stoutest trunk
Stoutest trunk: the tree is so broad that it was once thought to be several trees grown together, until DNA tests showed it is a single one.
Q 08The red 'worm' dropped into some bottles of Oaxacan mezcal is really the caterpillar of what?
A moth
A moth called Comadia redtenbacheri is the parent of the red maguey worm, and the custom is newer than it looks: a bottler first added larvae in 1950.
Q 09Oaxaca cheese, or quesillo, is stretched into ribbons and wound into balls, giving a texture like which Italian cheese?
Mozzarella
Mozzarella curd is made by the same stretching method, which Dominican friars brought to Oaxaca; the ribbons are rolled up like a ball of yarn.
Q 10Which conquistador was rewarded with the title Marquess of the Valley of Oaxaca after the fall of Tenochtitlan?
Hernán Cortés
Hernán Cortés received the title in 1529 but was passed over for the more powerful post of viceroy, which went to a high-ranking nobleman instead.
Q 11Which Oaxacan beach town draws surfers to Zicatela, a break nicknamed the Mexican Pipeline?
Puerto Escondido
Puerto Escondido means Hidden Port, and its wave earned the nickname by matching the force and shape of the Banzai Pipeline in Hawaii.
Q 12Zipolite, a hippie-era beach on Oaxaca's Pacific coast, became the first in Mexico to legally allow what?
Public nudity
Public nudity is legal on the sand here, and each February the beach hosts a naturist festival run with the local hoteliers' association.
Q 13Mazunte on the Oaxacan coast swapped a slaughterhouse for Mexico's national conservation centre for which animals?
Sea turtles
Q 21Which Zapotec shepherd boy from the Oaxacan village of Guelatao grew up to become president of Mexico?
Benito Juárez
Benito Juárez spoke only Zapotec and could not read when he moved to Oaxaca City at 12; he went on to become Mexico's first Indigenous president.
Q 22Which Oaxaca-born general ruled Mexico for over thirty years before the Revolution of 1910 forced him out?
Porfirio Díaz
Porfirio Díaz took the presidency in a military coup and served three separate spells in office, the longest rule of any Mexican leader.
Q 23Which Zapotec capital was built on an artificially levelled mountaintop overlooking the Valley of Oaxaca?
Monte Albán
Sea turtles made Mazunte the centre of Mexico's turtle hunting in the 1970s, and the village lived almost wholly on the trade until a 1990 ban.
Q 14Oaxaca's Isthmus of Tehuantepec is the shortest land crossing between the Pacific and which other body of water?
Gulf of Mexico
The Gulf of Mexico lies about 200 km away at the narrowest point, so a canal was proposed here as early as the 16th century, long before Panama got one.
Q 15Which Mexican state on the Guatemalan border is Oaxaca's only neighbour to the east?
Chiapas
Chiapas meets Oaxaca on the Isthmus and is one of just four states that touch it; the Pacific Ocean closes the gap to the south.
Q 16Oaxaca is divided into 570 of which local units, more than any other Mexican state has?
Municipalities
Municipalities here are small and numerous, and almost three quarters of them govern themselves by traditional custom instead of party politics.
Q 17Hierve el Agua, east of Oaxaca City, looks like frozen white waterfalls but is actually formed from what?
Mineral deposits
Mineral deposits build up as spring water loaded with calcium carbonate trickles over the cliffs, much as stalactites grow in caves.
Q 18Mexico's tourism agency laid out Huatulco on the Oaxacan coast in the 1980s on the model of which Caribbean resort?
Cancún
Cancún was the template when the agency bought 21,000 hectares here in 1984, though much of Huatulco's western shore is now protected as a national park.
Q 19Which renewable energy source is Oaxaca's Isthmus of Tehuantepec famous for harvesting?
Wind power
Wind power suits the Isthmus because the gap lets air rush from one coast to the other; the strongest gusts have their own name, the Tehuano.
Q 20The x in Oaxaca is now said roughly like an h, but which sound did it spell in medieval Spanish?
Sh
Sh, as in shop, was the sound of x when Spaniards first spelled the Nahuatl name Huaxyacac; speech shifted in the 16th century but the spelling stayed.
Monte Albán's Main Plaza was once coated in white plaster, and treasure from its Tomb 7 is now displayed in a former convent in Oaxaca City.
Q 24Which people set up a military post in the 1400s on the spot where Oaxaca City now stands?
The Aztecs
The Aztecs built their post at the foot of Cerro del Fortín, and the first Spanish expedition of 1521 raised its own town on the same spot.
Q 25Which crop, found as seeds in Oaxaca's Guilá Naquitz Cave, is the earliest known to be domesticated in the Americas?
Squash
Squash was being grown here up to 10,000 years ago, about 4,000 years before maize and beans were domesticated in the region.
Q 26Which independence hero and former president was shot at Cuilapan, Oaxaca, after being betrayed and seized at Acapulco?
Vicente Guerrero
Vicente Guerrero, Mexico's second president, had abolished slavery across almost all of the nation in 1829; the monastery that served as his prison still stands.
Q 27The Zapotecs of Oaxaca are credited with one of Mesoamerica's first systems of what, later echoed by the Maya?
Writing
Writing in Zapotec glyphs dates to about 500 BC and used a separate sign for each syllable; scholars see it as a forerunner of the Maya and Mixtec scripts.
Q 28Which Oaxacan ruin, named from a Nahuatl word for the underworld, is famed for walls of geometric stone mosaics?
Mitla
Mitla's mosaics are built from small cut and polished stones fitted together without mortar, a style found at no other Mesoamerican site.
Q 29Before it was renamed Oaxaca, the Spanish colonial city in the valley went by which name?
Antequera
Antequera survives in the nickname la Verde Antequera, a nod to the green stone used in so many of the old city's buildings.
Q 30The Zapotecs of Oaxaca's Central Valleys call themselves Be'ena' Za'a, a name usually translated into English as what?
The Cloud People
The Cloud People was a literal claim: the Zapotec elite believed they descended from beings who lived among the clouds and would return there after death.