Spanish Civil War Trivia
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49 free Spanish Civil War trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
The Spanish Civil War began with a half-failed coup in July 1936 and ended with Franco's radio broadcast of 1 April 1939. In between, Italy and Germany tested tanks and bombers, Stalin shipped arms under false decks, 32,000 foreigners joined the International Brigades, and a Basque market town became the subject of the century's most famous anti-war painting. This quiz walks through the conflict from the fall of the monarchy to the Retirada: the generals who planned the rising and the plane crashes that killed two of them, the siege of the Alcázar, Guadalajara and the Ebro, the Condor Legion and the Corpo Truppe Volontarie, Orwell and Bethune, the Munich Agreement, the Basque children on the SS Habana, and the poets and painters who responded. Fifty questions with four options each and a short explanation after every answer. Play on your phone or print it for a history quiz night.
30 of 49 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01The Spanish Civil War ended two weeks after Germany occupied which country?
Czechoslovakia
Czechoslovakia fell in mid-March 1939 and Madrid at the month's end; five months later Germany, which had tested its tank and air tactics in Spain, began World War II.
Q 02Which phrase came out of the 1936 Nationalist advance on Madrid?
Fifth column
Fifth column: a Nationalist general is credited with boasting that four columns were marching on Madrid while a fifth, his hidden supporters, waited inside the city.
Q 03Which king succeeded Franco as Spain's head of state in 1975?
Juan Carlos I
Juan Carlos I had been chosen by Franco himself and had sworn loyalty to his movement, but once on the throne he steered Spain back to democracy.
Q 04Which two countries openly armed and backed the Spanish Republic throughout the war?
Mexico and the USSR
Mexico and the USSR: Mexico refused to join the non-intervention pact and shipped rifles to the Republic, then took in thousands of its refugees when few other countries would.
Q 05Which Basque town was bombed by German aircraft on 26 April 1937?
Guernica
Guernica was the Basques' ancient meeting place, where their assemblies gathered under an oak tree; the raid wrecked most of the town, yet the oak and the assembly house survived.
Q 06What was the name of Nazi Germany's air and land force sent to help the Nationalists?
Condor Legion
Condor Legion: at Nuremberg, Hermann Göring said he had backed sending it partly to test his young Luftwaffe, and it was lent on condition that it stayed under German command.
Q 07Which dictator sent a 'Corps of Volunteer Troops' to aid Franco?
Benito Mussolini
Benito Mussolini sent regular soldiers and Blackshirt militia, tens of thousands of men in all, months after Italy had signed a pledge not to intervene in Spain.
Q 08Which photographer took 'The Falling Soldier', the 1936 picture that appears to catch a Republican militiaman at the moment of death?
Robert Capa
Robert Capa made his name with it in his early twenties, and lived by the rule it suggests: 'If your pictures aren't good enough, then you aren't close enough.'
Q 09The first battalion of American volunteers for the Republic was named after which president?
Lincoln
Lincoln: a second American battalion, named for George Washington, followed within months, but losses in both were so heavy that the two were merged in mid-1937.
Q 10Canadian volunteers joined a battalion named after which two rebels?
Mackenzie and Papineau
Mackenzie and Papineau led the rebellions of 1837 in Upper and Lower Canada; the men who took their names broke a new Canadian law to fight in Spain and came home under suspicion.
Q 11Which international body recruited and directed the International Brigades?
Comintern
Comintern: it drew volunteers from some 50 countries; in late 1938 the Republic withdrew them with a farewell parade, hoping the gesture would win over the Western democracies.
Q 12The flag of the Second Spanish Republic replaced the lower red stripe of Spain's flag with which colour?
Purple
Purple was added by the new republic to stand for Castile, on the belief, now doubted, that Castile's old banner was that colour; the rebels went back to plain red and yellow in 1936.
Q 13Which English writer fought with the POUM militia and wrote Homage to Catalonia?
George Orwell
Q 21The Republican government moved from Madrid in November 1936 to which city?
Valencia
Valencia took in the ministers because Madrid was expected to fall within days; instead the capital they had left to a defence junta held out for nearly two and a half years.
Q 22The relief of which besieged fortress was a propaganda triumph for Franco in September 1936?
The Alcázar
The Alcázar of Toledo had held out for ten weeks under Colonel Moscardó; turning aside to rescue it made Franco a hero to his side but gave Madrid time to prepare its defence.
Q 23Which title did Franco adopt as Spain's answer to the titles Duce and Führer?
Caudillo
Caudillo: his fellow generals gave him supreme power in autumn 1936 for what they thought would be the final assault on Madrid; he kept it until he died in 1975.
George Orwell was shot through the throat by a sniper, then had to flee Spain when his own side outlawed the POUM, which left him with a lifelong dread of communism.
Q 14Which Canadian surgeon built a mobile blood-transfusion service for the Republican front?
Norman Bethune
Norman Bethune took the blood to the wounded instead of waiting for them to reach a hospital; he died in China in 1939 as a surgeon with Mao's forces and is a national hero there.
Q 15Who was Nationalist figurehead until he died in a plane crash on 20 July 1936?
José Sanjurjo
José Sanjurjo was flying home from exile in Portugal to head the rising when his small plane crashed on take-off; its pilot blamed the general's heavy luggage.
Q 16Which general, commanding at Pamplona, was the chief planner of the July 1936 military coup?
Emilio Mola
Emilio Mola had been posted to Pamplona to keep him out of the way, and ran the plot from there; his death in an air accident in 1937 left Franco without a rival.
Q 17Which slogan became the battle cry of Republican Madrid in 1936?
¡No pasarán!
¡No pasarán!, 'They shall not pass': the Communist orator Dolores Ibárruri, known as La Pasionaria, made the cry famous as the rebel army neared Madrid in 1936, and the city held for over two years.
Q 18Before the 1936 coup, where had the Republic sent Franco to command?
The Canaries
The Canaries: the government had sent a suspect general to an obscure island command, yet within two days of the rising he had flown to Morocco and taken over the army there.
Q 19The 1936 People's Olympiad, a protest against Hitler's Berlin Games, was abandoned when war broke out in which host city?
Barcelona
Barcelona: athletes woke on the opening day to gunfire in the streets; most went home, but a few stayed on and joined the units defending the Republic.
Q 20The murder of which monarchist politician on 13 July 1936 became the coup's trigger?
José Calvo Sotelo
José Calvo Sotelo was seized at home by a squad avenging a police lieutenant murdered hours earlier, then shot in a police truck; the generals had been plotting for months, and his death brought their rising on within days.
Q 24Which March 1937 battle north-east of Madrid ended in a Republican victory?
Guadalajara
Guadalajara: the attackers' motorised units bogged down in foul weather and mud, and the Republic's counter-attack drove them back with heavy losses.
Q 25The Republic's last great offensive in 1938 was fought along which river?
Ebro
Ebro: the Republic's army crossed the river by night in small boats and held its bridgehead for nearly four months, but the effort broke it, and Catalonia fell soon afterwards.
Q 26Which agreement ended Republican hopes of help from the Western democracies?
Munich Agreement
Munich Agreement: the Republic had been holding on in the hope of a wider war that would bring the democracies in, and at Munich they chose to give way to Hitler instead.
Q 27The Aragon Offensive of 1938 reached the Mediterranean and achieved what?
Cut Republican Spain in two
Cut Republican Spain in two: Catalonia was severed from the centre and south, and when the Republic then sounded out peace terms, Franco would accept only unconditional surrender.
Q 28From which site near Madrid was Franco's body removed in 2019?
The Valley of the Fallen
The Valley of the Fallen holds war dead from both sides, and Franco lay among them for 44 years; his coffin left by helicopter for a family vault after his relatives lost their court challenge.
Q 29Which philosopher, rector of Salamanca, denounced the Nationalists in October 1936 and died under house arrest weeks later?
Miguel de Unamuno
Miguel de Unamuno had at first welcomed the rising; 'They will win, but they will not convince,' he wrote in a letter in his last weeks.
Q 30The best-known painting of the Spanish Civil War spent four decades in exile at which New York museum?
The Museum of Modern Art
The Museum of Modern Art held it at the artist's wish: he would not let it hang in Spain while Franco ruled, and it went home only in 1981, when both men were dead.