Tampa Trivia
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
7correct to beat the crowd
47 free Tampa trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Sep 2026.
49 free Tampa trivia questions with answers. Tampa is a city built by a railroad tycoon, a cigar baron and a pirate who never existed. This quiz covers all three, plus everything that came after: Fort Brooke at the mouth of the Hillsborough River, Henry Plant's minaret-topped hotel, Vicente Martinez Ybor's factories, the invented legend of Jose Gaspar and the krewe that still storms the city every January. The sports half runs from the Buccaneers' 0-26 start and their two Super Bowls to the Lightning's back-to-back Cups, the Rays' hurricane-forced move across the bay, the Big Sombrero and the pirate ship at Ray Jay. There are questions on Busch Gardens, the Sunshine Skyway, MacDill's two combatant commands, Tampa International's driverless people movers, Bern's wine cellar, the Columbia Restaurant, the TECO streetcar and, of course, whether salami belongs on a Cuban sandwich. About a third of the questions are ones any local should get; the rest reward people who read historical markers. Every answer is checked against Wikipedia or an official source, and the sentence that establishes it appears under each question.
30 of 47 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Fort Brooke, the 1824 army post Tampa grew up around, stood at the mouth of which river?
Hillsborough
Hillsborough. The army planted the fort at the river's mouth in 1824 to keep watch on the Seminoles, newly confined to a reservation inland; it closed in 1883, and downtown Tampa now covers the site.
Q 02The world's first scheduled airline to use airplanes began serving Tampa in 1914, crossing the bay in what?
A flying boat
A flying boat. Pilot Tony Jannus made the crossing in 23 minutes with a single passenger, a former mayor who had bid $400 at auction for the seat.
Q 03At the 2020 census Tampa was Florida's third-most-populous city, behind which two?
Jacksonville and Miami
Jacksonville and Miami. Jacksonville's lead is partly a matter of borders: it merged with most of Duval County in 1968, which made it one of the largest cities by area in the country.
Q 04Tampa is nicknamed 'Cigar City' and also 'The Big' what?
Guava
Guava. A columnist coined it in the 1970s as a play on the Big Apple, recalling the fruit broker who came hunting guavas in the 1880s and ended up steering Ybor's cigar makers to the town instead.
Q 05Henry B. Plant's 1891 railroad hotel is now the main building of which institution?
University of Tampa
University of Tampa. The 511-room resort closed in 1930, and three years later a new junior college moved into the empty building and grew into the university; its silver minarets are still the campus landmark.
Q 06Which colonel and his Rough Riders were quartered at the Tampa Bay Hotel in 1898 before sailing for Cuba?
Theodore Roosevelt
Tampa was the army's embarkation port for the invasion, and generals used the hotel as their base of operations.
Q 07In 1885 Tampa persuaded cigar maker Vicente Martinez Ybor to move his factories from which city?
Key West
Key West. Ybor had moved there from Havana when Cuba's revolt began in 1868, but labour trouble and poor transport sent him looking again; he gave Tampa all his time after fire destroyed his island factory in 1886.
Q 08Ybor City's cigar rollers chipped in from their own wages to hire someone to do what?
Read aloud
Read aloud to them. From a raised platform the lector worked through the day's newspapers and then novels such as Don Quixote; owners blamed the readings for spreading radical ideas and had them removed after a 1931 strike.
Q 09Most of Ybor City's cigar-era immigrants came from Cuba and two European countries, including which of these?
Italy
Italy. Most were Sicilians, many of whom had first cut sugar cane elsewhere in the South; they arrived with no cigar-making skills, so they started at the bottom of the factories or opened shops and farms instead.
Q 10In 2008 which Ybor City street was named one of the '10 Great Streets in America'?
Seventh Avenue
Seventh Avenue. Locals call it La Setima, or simply Broadway; by the early 1970s only a handful of businesses were left on it, and its brick cigar-era blocks have since been revived as Tampa's nightlife strip.
Q 11Ybor City's Columbia Restaurant, Florida's oldest, calls itself the world's largest restaurant for which cuisine?
Spanish
Spanish. It began in 1903 as a corner saloon and has since swallowed an entire city block, with fifteen dining rooms seating 1,700; the founder's family still runs it five generations on.
Q 12Which meat, absent from the Miami version, is traditionally layered into a Tampa Cuban sandwich?
Genoa salami
Genoa salami. When Tampa's city council declared the 'Historic Tampa Cuban' the city's signature sandwich in 2012, Miami's mayor shot back that salami is for pizza.
Q 13Since 2005 the Gasparilla Pirate Festival parade has been held on the last Saturday of which month?
January
Q 21Raymond James Financial, holder of the Buccaneers' stadium naming rights, is headquartered in which city?
St. Petersburg
St. Petersburg. No single Raymond James is behind the name: broker Robert James opened his firm there in 1962 and merged it two years later with Raymond and Associates, so the stadium bears two surnames.
Q 22Which team won a then-record sixth Super Bowl at Raymond James Stadium in 2009 on a last-minute toe-tap touchdown catch?
Pittsburgh Steelers
Pittsburgh Steelers. Santonio Holmes kept both feet down in the corner of the end zone with 35 seconds left to beat Arizona 27-23, making Pittsburgh the first team to win six Super Bowls.
Q 23What was the nickname of Tampa Stadium, the Buccaneers' original home, demolished in 1999?
January. For decades the invasion fell on a Monday in February; it moved to a Saturday in 1988 so that people from out of town could join in, and settled on its present date in 2005.
Q 14The Jose Gasparilla II pirate ship that 'invades' Tampa each year is actually what kind of vessel?
A steel barge
A steel barge. Built for the 1954 invasion, it has masts and rigging but no engine or working sails, so tugboats tow it across the bay while hundreds of private boats tag along.
Q 15When the pirates land during Gasparilla, what do they demand from Tampa's mayor?
The key to the city
The key to the city. Whether or not the mayor plays along, the krewe then leads a victory parade of more than 100 floats down Bayshore Boulevard, past a crowd of around 300,000.
Q 16Ye Mystic Krewe of Gasparilla modelled itself on the krewes of which other city's celebration?
New Orleans' Mardi Gras
New Orleans' Mardi Gras. The link was literal from the start: for the first mock invasion in 1904 the krewe rode into town on horseback wearing costumes rented from New Orleans.
Q 17The expansion Buccaneers lost their first 26 games in orange uniforms later nicknamed after which frozen treat?
Creamsicle
Creamsicle. The 0-26 start across 1976 and 1977 is still the longest losing streak of the Super Bowl era; the orange was dropped for red and pewter in 1997, then brought back as a throwback.
Q 18The Buccaneers won their first Super Bowl, XXXVII, by routing which team 48-21?
Oakland Raiders
Oakland Raiders. Tampa's coach Jon Gruden had been the Raiders' own head coach until a trade a year earlier, and his new defence returned three interceptions for touchdowns against his old team.
Q 19By winning Super Bowl LV in 2021, the Buccaneers became the first NFL team to win one under what circumstance?
At their home stadium
At their home stadium. The league still treated Raymond James as a neutral site, so the Buccaneers' touchdown cannons stayed silent during play, and Tom Brady was named MVP at the end of his first Tampa season.
Q 20What 103-foot structure at Raymond James Stadium fires cannons when the Buccaneers score?
A replica pirate ship
A replica pirate ship sits in Buccaneer Cove behind one end zone, 43 tons of steel and concrete whose cannons boom once for every point the Buccaneers score.
The Big Sombrero
The Big Sombrero got its name from ESPN's Chris Berman, after a mid-1970s expansion left the rim rising and dipping like a hat brim. It hosted two Super Bowls before it came down in 1999.
Q 24Super Bowl XXV at Tampa Stadium ended on a missed Buffalo kick remembered by which two words?
Wide right
Wide right. Scott Norwood's 47-yard try drifted past the upright in the final seconds, the Giants won 20-19, and Buffalo went on to lose the next three Super Bowls as well.
Q 25Who became the first woman to play for a major North American pro league team, in a 1992 Tampa Bay Lightning exhibition?
Manon Rhéaume
Manon Rhéaume tended goal for one period of a preseason game against the St. Louis Blues at Expo Hall, allowing two goals. She went on to win Olympic silver with Canada in 1998.
Q 26Which Hall of Fame centre fronted the ownership group that won Tampa an NHL expansion franchise in 1990?
Phil Esposito
The Lightning began play in 1992-93 and lifted their first Stanley Cup in 2004.
Q 27How did Tampa celebrate the Lightning's 2020 Stanley Cup win, starting a local tradition?
A boat parade
A boat parade. Players cruised the downtown river with the Cup as fans lined the Riverwalk, and the Buccaneers copied it months later, when Tom Brady tossed the Lombardi Trophy from one boat to another.
Q 28Under what name did Tampa Bay's Major League Baseball team begin play in 1998?
Devil Rays
Devil Rays. The 'Devil' was dropped after 2007, leaving a name that nods to both the fish and Florida sunshine, and the renamed club went straight from last place to the 2008 World Series.
Q 29Which 2024 hurricane tore the roof off Tropicana Field and forced the Rays out of their home?
Milton
Milton. Its winds shredded most of the dome's fabric roof in October 2024, and the Rays spent all of 2025 outdoors in an 11,000-seat ballpark across the bay in Tampa.
Q 30George M. Steinbrenner Field, the Rays' 2025 home, is the spring-training home of which team?
New York Yankees
New York Yankees. George Steinbrenner, their longtime owner, lived in Tampa; the ballpark opened in 1996 as Legends Field and was renamed for him in March 2008.