Santa Fe Trivia
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42 free Santa Fe trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Santa Fe has been a capital since 1610, longer than any other US state capital, and sits higher than all of them at 6,998 feet. This quiz covers four centuries of that history: Pedro de Peralta's founding, the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 and Diego de Vargas's reconquest, the Santa Fe Trail from Missouri, Kearny's Army of the West, the railroad that skipped the city for Lamy and statehood in 1912. The City Different's culture gets equal time: the Palace of the Governors, the Loretto Chapel's Miraculous Stair, Bishop Lamy's limestone cathedral, the Roundhouse capitol, the 1957 adobe ordinance, Zozobra and the Fiestas, the Santa Fe Opera, Canyon Road, the Indian Market, the O'Keeffe Museum, Meow Wolf and the Santa Fe Institute's complexity scientists. Every answer is sourced from Wikipedia pages on the city and its landmarks. Play in sets of ten, then try the Albuquerque or New Mexico quizzes.
30 of 42 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01What does 'Santa Fe' mean in English?
Holy Faith
Holy Faith: Governor Pedro de Peralta named his new capital La Villa Real de la Santa Fe de San Francisco de Asís, the Royal Town of the Holy Faith of Saint Francis of Assisi, and everyday speech kept just two of its words.
Q 02Santa Fe holds which distinction among US state capitals?
Highest altitude
Highest altitude: at roughly 7,000 feet above sea level, Santa Fe sits about a third of a mile higher than Denver, the capital that calls itself the Mile High City.
Q 03Which famous highway ran through Santa Fe until a 1937 realignment bypassed the city?
Route 66
Route 66: its first route looped north through Santa Fe until Governor Arthur Hannett, voted out in 1926 and blaming the capital's politicians, is said to have rushed through a cutoff that left the city off the road.
Q 04Which mountain range rises behind Santa Fe?
Sangre de Cristo Mountains
Sangre de Cristo Mountains: this southern arm of the Rockies rises so close to the city that a ski area on its slopes lies just 16 miles from the Plaza.
Q 05Which Santa Fe adobe church is often called the oldest church in the continental United States?
San Miguel Chapel
San Miguel Chapel: its bell seems to carry the date 1356 and was long claimed as one of the oldest in the country, until a historian found an old man who remembered it being cast in 1856.
Q 06Who led the first Spanish colonization of New Mexico in 1598?
Juan de Oñate
Juan de Oñate: he planted the colony in 1598 but governed it so harshly that Spain later put him on trial, found him guilty of cruelty and banished him from New Mexico.
Q 07Which 1680 uprising drove the Spanish out of Santa Fe for twelve years?
Pueblo Revolt
Pueblo Revolt: after decades in which missionaries burned their masks and sacred objects, most of the Pueblo peoples rose together under Popé in August 1680 and kept the Spanish out of New Mexico until 1692.
Q 08Who retook Santa Fe for Spain in 1692 in the so-called 'Bloodless Reconquest'?
Diego de Vargas
Diego de Vargas re-entered Santa Fe in September 1692 without a battle, though hard fighting followed in 1693; the Fiestas de Santa Fe, held each September, commemorate his entrada.
Q 09Beginning in the 1820s, the Santa Fe Trail linked the city to which US frontier state?
Missouri
Missouri: earlier American traders who neared Santa Fe had been arrested by Spanish soldiers, but when William Becknell set out from Franklin in 1821, newly independent Mexico welcomed his goods and the trade took off.
Q 10Which novel did a governor of New Mexico Territory finish in Santa Fe's Palace of the Governors?
Ben-Hur
Ben-Hur: Lew Wallace finished it there in 1880, writing at night after his official duties, which included a deal for Billy the Kid's testimony that collapsed when the district attorney refused to free the outlaw.
Q 11Which US general marched into Santa Fe in 1846 to claim New Mexico?
Stephen W. Kearny
Stephen W. Kearny: the Mexican force waiting on the road withdrew, and his troops marched into Santa Fe unopposed in August 1846, taking New Mexico without a shot.
Q 12Which Confederate general's forces occupied Santa Fe in March 1862?
Henry Sibley
Henry Hopkins Sibley's Texan brigade occupied Santa Fe in March 1862, but after Union troops burned his supply train at Glorieta Pass on March 28 he retreated down the Rio Grande to Texas.
Q 13Which French-born bishop built Santa Fe's St. Francis Cathedral?
Jean Baptiste Lamy
Q 21Which artist created the first Old Man Gloom effigy in his backyard in 1924?
Will Shuster
Will Shuster: the painter is said to have borrowed the idea from a Mexican Easter custom of burning an effigy of Judas, and in 1964 he signed his creation over to the Kiwanis Club, which has staged it since.
Q 22Roughly how tall is the Old Man Gloom effigy?
50 feet
50 feet: the 2007 Old Man Gloom, a few inches short of that, was certified by Guinness as the world's largest marionette, though a taller puppet built in Canada took the record a year later.
Q 23In Santa Fe restaurants, what does ordering your chile 'Christmas' get you?
Both red and green chile
Jean Baptiste Lamy, who reached Santa Fe in 1851 and became its first archbishop in 1875, began the cathedral in 1869; Willa Cather based 'Death Comes for the Archbishop' on him.
Q 14In what style was St. Francis Cathedral built, in contrast to the adobe around it?
Romanesque Revival
Romanesque Revival: French architects raised it around the old adobe church, which was then torn down and carried out through the new front door, and the planned spires were never built for lack of funds.
Q 15The Loretto Chapel is famous for which feature?
A spiral staircase
A spiral staircase: in the Sisters' telling, a stranger turned up after their nine days of prayer to St. Joseph, built two full turns of stairs with no central support or nails, and left without collecting his pay.
Q 16The Loretto Chapel's design was modeled on which Paris landmark?
Sainte-Chapelle
Projectus Mouly modeled the Gothic Revival chapel on Sainte-Chapelle in Paris; its French stained glass traveled by ship to New Orleans and then by wagon over the Santa Fe Trail.
Q 17New Mexico's State Capitol in Santa Fe is nicknamed what?
The Roundhouse
Nicknamed the Roundhouse, New Mexico's capitol is the only round state capitol in the United States; from above its plan echoes the Zia sun symbol on the state flag.
Q 18Santa Fe's historic-district ordinance requires new buildings to follow which styles?
Spanish Territorial or Pueblo
Spanish Territorial or Pueblo: the rule is why even new buildings downtown have flat roofs and earth-toned stucco walls, often laid over concrete block or lumber instead of real adobe.
Q 19What are the exposed roof beams that poke through adobe walls called?
Vigas
Vigas: the word is simply Spanish for beams, and on many newer Santa Fe buildings the log ends poking through the wall hold nothing up, added only to give the old adobe look.
Q 20Which giant effigy, 'Old Man Gloom', is burned each year before the Fiestas de Santa Fe?
Zozobra
Zozobra: his creator and a newspaper editor chose the name, a Spanish word for anxiety, and each year people's written 'glooms' are stuffed inside the giant puppet so their troubles burn with him.
Both red and green chile: servers ask 'Red or green?' with every order, a habit the state legislature turned into New Mexico's official state question, and 'Christmas' is the diner's way of asking for the two sauces together.
Q 24How was the Santa Fe Opera's site chosen?
Firing guns
Firing guns: the founder and an acoustician crossed a former guest ranch setting off shots until they found the natural bowl where sound carried best.
Q 25Who founded the Santa Fe Opera in 1956?
John Crosby
John Crosby: a New York conductor, he launched the company with his parents' money, then ran it himself for more than four decades before stepping down in 2000.
Q 26What is the name of Meow Wolf's flagship Santa Fe installation?
House of Eternal Return
House of Eternal Return: visitors walk into a two-story Victorian house whose fictional family has vanished, then crawl through its fireplace and other hidden portals into caves and parallel worlds.
Q 27Which fantasy author originally backed the Meow Wolf art collective?
George R. R. Martin
George R. R. Martin bought the defunct Silva Lanes bowling alley and leased it to the collective for its first permanent home in Santa Fe.
Q 28Which painter's own museum is in Santa Fe?
Georgia O'Keeffe
Georgia O'Keeffe: she began spending summers in New Mexico in 1929 and moved there for good in 1949, and the museum, opened in 1997, also takes visitors to her home and studio in Abiquiú.
Q 29In 2005 Santa Fe became a member of which UNESCO program?
Creative Cities Network
Creative Cities Network: UNESCO lists Santa Fe under crafts and folk art, noting that one job in ten there is tied to arts and culture and that more than 250 galleries do business in the city.
Q 30Which Museum Hill museum was founded in 1953 by Florence Dibell Bartlett?
Museum of International Folk Art
Museum of International Folk Art: Bartlett believed folk art could bring 'a closer understanding between men', and her founding gift from 34 countries has since grown to well over 100,000 objects.