This Santa Barbara trivia quiz has 50 free questions with answers and covers the American Riviera from the Chumash villages and the Queen of the Missions to the Funk Zone and the film festival. There are questions on why the streets dogleg, the earthquake that gave the city its Spanish Colonial look, the 'most beautiful public building in the United States', the wharf that made the town reachable, the Japanese submarine that shelled the coast in 1942, the silent-film studio that predated Hollywood, the seaplane tests that became Lockheed, and the 1969 oil blowout that helped launch the environmental movement. It also takes in Old Spanish Days, the Solstice Parade, the fig tree by the train station, the Santa Barbara Bowl, UC Santa Barbara's Gauchos, Reagan's Western White House in the mountains, Montecito's famous neighbours, the surfers, the soap opera and the pop star born there. Every answer has been checked against the Wikipedia pages for the city and its landmarks, and each explanation adds one detail worth remembering.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Santa Barbara's Mediterranean climate and coastline have earned it what nickname?
The American Riviera
Its stretch of coast is the longest south-facing section on the US West Coast outside Alaska, which is why the sun sets over the ocean to the west of a south-facing beach.
Q 02Which mountain range rises steeply directly behind the city?
The Santa Ynez Mountains
The east-west range tops 4,000 feet, gets a dusting of snow about once every three years and hides the Los Padres National Forest behind it.
Q 03Which Native people lived in at least five villages on the site of Santa Barbara?
The Chumash
At least 25,000 of them lived in the region; the village of Syukhtun stood where the Los Baños pool is now, and their plank canoe was called a tomol.
Q 04Which Spanish explorer sailed through the channel in 1542 and anchored briefly off the future city?
Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo
The name Santa Barbara came 60 years later, when Vizcaíno christened the channel and one of the islands in 1602.
Q 05Mission Santa Barbara was founded on 4 December 1786. Where did it fall in the sequence of California missions?
Tenth
It was dedicated by Padre Fermín Lasuén, who succeeded Junípero Serra as head of the mission chain, and it is still run by Franciscans.
Q 06By what regal nickname is Mission Santa Barbara known?
The Queen of the Missions
Rebuilt grandly after the 1812 earthquake, it is the best preserved of the missions and holds the archives of many of the others.
Q 07The 1812 tsunami that destroyed the first Santa Barbara Mission carried a ship how far up Refugio Canyon?
Half a mile
Water reached as high as present-day Anapamu Street; the Mission was rebuilt by 1820 in the grander form that stands today.
Q 08Which American officer's battalion took Santa Barbara without bloodshed on 27 December 1846?
John C. Frémont
The town became American with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848 and promptly turned into a haven for gamblers and bandits.
Q 09Why do some downtown intersections have doglegs?
The 1851 surveyor botched the block measurements
Salisbury Haley laid out the grid in 1851 and got the block sizes wrong, so streets don't quite line up.
Q 10Stearns Wharf, built in 1872, was named after a local businessman in which trade?
Lumber
Before John Peck Stearns built it, passengers and cargo had to be rowed ashore through the kelp and breakers; it was the longest deep-water pier between LA and San Francisco.
Q 11Which president in 1891 became the first of five sitting presidents to visit Santa Barbara?
Benjamin Harrison
The railroad had reached the town from Los Angeles in 1887, and Charles Nordhoff's writing had already sold it as a health resort.
Q 12The Summerland Oil Field, just east of the city, holds what distinction?
World's first offshore oil drilling
Derricks and piers marched out into the surf from the 1890s, starting a fight over offshore drilling that the region has never really finished.
Q 13What was the world's largest silent-film studio, based in Santa Barbara before Hollywood?
Flying A Studios
Q 21Which annual August festival, a 1920s tourist draw, was originally called 'Old Spanish Days'?
Fiesta
Flower Girls under 13 throw roses into the crowds during Fiesta Pequeña and the parades.
Q 22What is the main rule of the Summer Solstice Parade, which draws up to 100,000 people?
No written words or banners
Floats and costumes range from whimsical to outrageous, and the route ends at Alameda Park.
Q 23The I Madonnari festival, held on Memorial Day weekend at the Mission, features what art?
Chalk drawings on asphalt
It ran on two blocks at State and Mission from 1910 to 1922 and turned out roughly 1,200 films, of which about 100 survive.
Q 14The Loughead Aircraft Company, which tested seaplanes off East Beach, grew into which aerospace giant?
Lockheed
The brothers eventually changed the spelling of the company name to match how everyone pronounced it.
Q 15How many people died in the magnitude 6.3 earthquake of 29 June 1925?
13
It struck at 6:44 a.m., before the streets filled, and the rebuilding cemented the Spanish Colonial style the city is known for.
Q 16Which 1929 building is called 'the most beautiful public building in the United States'?
The County Courthouse
The William Mooser Company designed it in a Spanish-Andalusian castle style; its Sunken Gardens host summer movie nights.
Q 17The Spirit of the Ocean fountain, a man and woman emerging from the sea, stands in front of which landmark?
The County Courthouse
The building's open-air clock tower gives the best free view of the red-tile roofs downtown.
Q 18Which oil field west of the city did a Japanese submarine shell in 1942, the first wartime shelling of the US mainland?
Ellwood
The 16 shells did about $500 of damage to a catwalk, but panic sent residents fleeing and land values to historic lows.
Q 19The 1969 oil spill came from a blowout on Platform A, operated by which company?
Union Oil
Up to 100,000 barrels fouled the coast from Goleta to Ventura and helped bring about NEPA, CEQA and, months later, the first Earth Day.
Q 20Outraged locals responded to the 1969 spill by forming a group with what acronym?
GOO
It stood for Get Oil Out; the spill was the largest in US waters at the time and remains the largest ever off California.
The ephemeral works are washed away by the first rain, in the Italian street-painting tradition.
Q 24The Santa Barbara International Film Festival is held in which usually quiet month?
Late January
It runs about ten days at the 2,000-seat Arlington Theatre and draws more than 50,000 people in the off-season.
Q 25Santa Barbara's giant Moreton Bay fig grew from a seedling given in 1876 by whom?
An Australian seaman
A local girl planted it on State Street; her friend moved it to its current spot by what is now the Amtrak station a year later.
Q 26The Santa Barbara Bowl, the city's outdoor concert amphitheatre, seats roughly how many people?
4,500
It sits in a canyon at the base of the Riviera and hosts about 27 shows a season, booked exclusively by Goldenvoice.
Q 27Which stretch of lower State Street near the beach is known for breweries and wine-tasting rooms?
The Funk Zone
The New Noise music conference has held its main party there since 2009.
Q 28What is the mascot of the University of California, Santa Barbara?
The Gaucho
The campus, on the site of a wartime Marine air station, joined the UC system in 1944 and counts 11 Nobel laureates among its people.
Q 29UC Santa Barbara's oceanfront campus was built on the site of what?
A wartime Marine air station
It is the third-oldest campus in the UC system, after Berkeley and UCLA, and was the third host on the ARPAnet.
Q 30Rancho del Cielo, in the mountains above the city, was the vacation retreat of which president?
Ronald Reagan
The 'Western White House' hosted Margaret Thatcher, Queen Elizabeth II and Mikhail Gorbachev, and it's where he signed the 1981 tax cut.