San Antonio
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99 free San Antonio trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
San Antonio is the seventh-largest city in the United States and still feels like a frontier town with a river running through the middle. Spanish explorers named it for Saint Anthony in 1691, a mission and presidio followed in 1718, fifteen Canary Island families made it the first chartered civil settlement in Texas in 1731, and then the Alamo happened. Today it is Military City USA, a UNESCO Creative City of Gastronomy, and home to the Spurs. These 99 questions go well beyond the Alamo: the Payaya name for the springs, Father Olivares and his Spanish hometown, Juan Seguín, Frederick Law Olmsted's verdict, the 1877 railroad, the German third of the city, the River Walk that Robert Hugman drew in 1929, the hotel that rolled three blocks in 1985, HemisFair '68 and the Tower of the Americas, Lackland and Fort Sam Houston, Valero, USAA and H-E-B, Fiesta, the 40-foot cowboy boots and the five NBA titles. Easy questions stick to the river, the county and the nicknames; the hardest ask about the first sheriff-era settlers, the dragon who became H.R. Pufnstuf and the first sister city. Every answer is cited to a page we checked, with a short explanation so you learn something even when you miss. Play it solo or print it for a Texas trivia night.
30 of 99 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01San Antonio is the county seat of which Texas county?
Bexar
Bexar County, said "bear", once sprawled across most of western Texas, and 128 other counties have since been carved out of it. The name comes from the Spanish fort San Antonio de Béxar.
Q 02In the 2020 census, which was the only Texas city with more residents than San Antonio?
Houston
Houston counted about 2.3 million people to San Antonio's 1.43 million. The surprise is who came next: Dallas, with 1.3 million inside its city limits, ranked behind San Antonio.
Q 03San Antonio was named in 1691 in honour of which saint?
Anthony of Padua
Anthony of Padua got the honour by a quirk of the calendar: a Spanish expedition reached the river on June 13, his feast day, and named the spot for him.
Q 04Which rock star was banned from playing San Antonio for a decade after urinating at the Alamo in 1982?
Ozzy Osbourne
Ozzy Osbourne was arrested, released within hours and still played his show that night. The city let him back in 1992, after he apologised and gave $10,000 to the group that looked after the shrine.
Q 05Which snack brand began in San Antonio in 1932, when sweet-shop manager Charles Doolin bought a corn chip recipe?
Fritos
Fritos, from the Spanish for "fried", were first cooked at Doolin's home, where his mother helped perfect the recipe. The deal for the recipe also brought him the seller's existing customers.
Q 06The Alamo's name is the Spanish word for which kind of tree?
Cottonwood
Cottonwood is "álamo" in Spanish. The old mission may owe the nickname to a grove beside it, or to the soldiers later housed there, whose company came from the Mexican town of Álamo de Parras.
Q 07Which frontiersman and former Tennessee congressman died defending the Alamo in 1836?
Davy Crockett
Davy Crockett came to Texas after voters threw him out of Congress in 1835. He is quoted telling them they "might go to hell, and I would go to Texas"; he was dead within months.
Q 08Settlers from which islands founded San Antonio's civil government in the 1730s, the first in Texas?
The Canary Islands
The Canary Islands supplied 56 settlers, who landed in Mexico and marched overland from the port of Veracruz. Some of San Antonio's oldest families still trace their descent from them.
Q 09Spain founded San Antonio in the early 1700s partly to keep which rival power out of Texas?
France
France held Louisiana next door, and its traders were already dealing with Texas tribes. So the viceroy approved San Antonio as a halfway post between the Rio Grande and Spain's missions in East Texas.
Q 10Which Texian colonel rallied 300 volunteers to storm San Antonio in December 1835 and died in the fighting?
Ben Milam
Ben Milam spoke up as the army was about to give up the siege for the winter, asking who would go with "old Ben Milam" into the town. A sniper killed him two days before the Mexican surrender.
Q 11Which Tejano hero of San Jacinto, later mayor of San Antonio, gave his name to a city just east of it?
Juan Seguín
Juan Seguín resigned as mayor in 1842 amid threats on his life and fled to Mexico. The hero of Texas independence then found himself fighting for the other side in the Mexican–American War.
Q 12Which visiting reporter of the 1850s described San Antonio's "jumble of races, costumes, languages and buildings"?
Frederick Law Olmsted
Frederick Law Olmsted crossed Texas on horseback writing for a New York newspaper, years before he co-designed Central Park. He thought almost no American city could match San Antonio's "odd and antiquated foreignness".
Q 13Cattle drives from San Antonio to Kansas followed which trail?
Q 21Which insurer was founded in San Antonio in 1922 by Army officers who struggled to get cover for their cars?
USAA
USAA began when 25 officers met in a downtown hotel and agreed to insure one another, because insurers treated soldiers, who were always being posted somewhere new, as bad risks. Its members still own it.
Q 22Which grocery chain, founded in a small Texas town in 1905, has its headquarters in San Antonio?
H-E-B
H-E-B takes its initials from Howard Edward Butt, who took the business over from his mother, Florence. She had opened the first store on the ground floor of the family home in Kerrville.
Q 23Besides "Alamo City", which nickname does San Antonio use for itself?
Military City, USA
Chisholm
Chisholm at first named only a stretch of the route north of Texas, and the label spread to the whole trail later. The drives died out in the mid-1880s, after railroads had reached San Antonio and Kansas had shut its border to Texas cattle.
Q 14Around 1880, roughly a third of San Antonio's residents were of which ethnic background?
German
German immigrants were so numerous that their language was heard on the streets about as often as English or Spanish. Their richest merchants built the mansions of the King William district.
Q 15At which San Antonio hotel did Theodore Roosevelt recruit Rough Riders in 1898?
The Menger
The Menger Hotel grew out of a brewery: William Menger's beer drew so many visitors that in 1859 he and his wife opened a hotel beside it, a few steps from the Alamo. The regiment made its bar a favourite watering hole.
Q 16In 2017 UNESCO named San Antonio a Creative City for what?
Gastronomy
Gastronomy won it for a cuisine fused over three centuries from the cooking of Spanish colonists and later settlers, the tradition behind Tex-Mex. Only Tucson, Arizona, had earned the title among US cities before.
Q 17What is San Antonio's primary source of drinking water?
The Edwards Aquifer
The Edwards Aquifer is a honeycomb of water-filled limestone that shelters blind salamanders and catfish found nowhere else. San Antonio exists because of it: the city grew up around the big springs it feeds.
Q 18The Balcones Escarpment, which runs through San Antonio, marks the eastern edge of which Texas region?
The Hill Country
The Hill Country begins at the escarpment, where ancient faults lifted a limestone plateau above the coastal plain. Seen from the flat side, the plateau's worn edge looks like a line of wooded hills.
Q 19Which Spurs center and Naval Academy graduate was nicknamed "The Admiral"?
David Robinson
David Robinson was the first pick of the 1987 draft, but the Spurs had to wait two years while he served out his Navy commitment. He was named Rookie of the Year when he finally arrived.
Q 20In which 1985 film does the hero travel to San Antonio to search the Alamo's basement for his stolen bicycle?
Pee-wee's Big Adventure
Pee-wee's Big Adventure ends the search with a tour guide's news that the Alamo has no basement. These days it has two, one of them under the gift shop, and Pee-wee actor Paul Reubens toured it in 2011.
Military City, USA has the bases to back it up: an Army post and two Air Force bases, since merged into one joint base. The city itself grew out of a Spanish fort and mission founded in 1718.
Q 24Every enlisted Air Force recruit goes through basic training at which San Antonio base?
Lackland
Lackland took on a second service in 2020, when the first enlisted members of the new Space Force went through boot camp there alongside the Air Force's recruits.
Q 25An Army post in San Antonio hosts the world's largest centre for what kind of training?
Military medical education
Military medical education for three services shares one campus there. A 2005 base-closure plan ordered the Navy and Air Force to move their medics' schools to San Antonio and train beside the Army's.
Q 26Which future NBA giant led San Antonio's Cole High School to an unbeaten season and a state title in 1989?
Shaquille O'Neal
Shaquille O'Neal was an Army sergeant's stepson, and Cole is the school for families posted to the Army's base in the city. His senior-year team went 36–0.
Q 27Which comedy star, born in San Antonio in 1933, fronted a CBS variety show under her own name for 11 seasons?
Carol Burnett
Carol Burnett lived in San Antonio with her grandmother until she was seven. The ear tug that closed every episode of her show began as a secret hello to her.
Q 28Which San Antonio theme park, opened in 2010, was designed so that guests with disabilities could enjoy every ride?
Morgan's Wonderland
Morgan's Wonderland was built by Gordon Hartman after he watched other children walk away from his daughter Morgan at a hotel pool. Guests with disabilities get in free.
Q 29Which San Antonio institution was the first devoted to modern art in Texas?
The McNay Art Museum
The McNay Art Museum began as a home: oil heiress and painter Marion Koogler McNay left the city her 24-room mansion, her collection and most of her fortune to turn it into a museum.
Q 30A giant pair of what stands outside San Antonio's North Star Mall?
Cowboy boots
Cowboy boots, and they were not made for Texas at all: artist Bob "Daddy-O" Wade built them in 1979 for a site near the White House. When that show ended, they were taken apart and hauled to the mall.