Trinidad and Tobago Trivia
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49 free Trinidad and Tobago trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Trinidad and Tobago sits just 11 km off Venezuela at the bottom of the Caribbean, and this quiz covers the twin-island republic from Columbus to Carnival: the Banwari Man, Raleigh's raid on San José, the Spanish cédula that filled Trinidad with French planters, Abercromby's bloodless conquest of 1797, the Fatel Razack and the Indian indentured workers, Tobago changing hands 31 times, oil, Eric Williams and independence in 1962, the 1990 coup attempt and the first female prime minister. Easy questions ask for the capital, the neighbour across the channel, the national instrument and the country's most famous dance; the harder ones want the meaning of 'Chinidad', the highest peak, the world's largest asphalt lake, the two national birds, the year of Carnival's national instrument declaration and the street food invented in 1936. There is also Brian Lara's 400, Hasely Crawford's gold, Dwight Yorke's World Cup, Naipaul and Walcott, Nicki Minaj, Angostura bitters and Miss Universe. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on the country, its people and its history, and each question carries the sentence that backs it up.
30 of 49 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01What is the capital of Trinidad and Tobago?
Port of Spain
Port of Spain, on the Gulf of Paria in north-west Trinidad, has been the seat of government since 1757, when the Spanish moved it from San José de Oruña.
Q 02Trinidad lies about 11 km off the coast of which South American country?
Venezuela
Venezuela. Trinidad sits on South America's continental shelf and was once joined to the mainland, so its wildlife, from howler monkeys to anacondas, is closer to the continent's than to the rest of the Caribbean's.
Q 03Which island's 1961 vote to leave the West Indies Federation prompted Trinidad and Tobago's exit?
Jamaica
Jamaica. Its voters chose to leave in September 1961, Trinidad's premier judged that 'one from ten leaves nought' and pulled out too, and both islands became independent in August 1962.
Q 04Which instrument, invented in Trinidad in the 1930s and 40s, is its national instrument?
The steelpan
The steelpan evolved from Carnival's tamboo-bamboo bands as players hammered discarded oil drums into tuned instruments; in 2023 the UN General Assembly declared 11 August World Steelpan Day.
Q 05Which party dance began as a ritual performed at wakes in Trinidad and Tobago?
The limbo
The limbo was danced at wakes long before it was a party game. Julia Edwards, the 'First Lady of Limbo', made it a stage act, and her troupe carried it abroad in the 1957 film 'Fire Down Below'.
Q 06Which explorer sighted Trinidad in 1498 and named it for the Holy Trinity?
Christopher Columbus
Christopher Columbus reached the island on 31 July 1498, on his third voyage. He is said to have vowed to name the next land he found for the Trinity, and his lookout then reported three hills.
Q 07What is the capital of Tobago?
Scarborough
Scarborough has not always had its English name: after France captured Tobago in 1781, the capital was renamed Port Louis for the years of French rule.
Q 08Trinidad and Tobago's Carnival comes to its climax in the two days before which Christian observance?
Ash Wednesday
Ash Wednesday, the start of Lent. The two days open before dawn with J'ouvert, when revellers dance through the streets covered in paint, mud and oil.
Q 09Courland, the Baltic duchy behind a 17th-century colony on Tobago, lay in which present-day country?
Latvia
Latvia. Duke Jacob's settlers left the name Great Courland Bay on Tobago's coast, but the Dutch took the colony over while the Swedes held the duke captive from 1658 to 1660.
Q 10Britain merged Tobago with Trinidad in 1889 after the collapse of which Tobago industry?
Sugar
Sugar. Cheaper cane and subsidised beet from elsewhere had ruined Tobago's planters, and after the London firm that financed them failed in 1884, Britain passed the cost of running the island to Trinidad.
Q 11From 1845, Trinidad's planters brought indentured labourers from India to replace workers lost to what?
Emancipation
Emancipation. Once slavery ended in 1838, planters could not get the cheap, steady labour they wanted and looked to India: the Fatel Razack landed the first workers on 30 May 1845, now marked as Indian Arrival Day.
Q 12Which group narrowly outnumbered Afro-Trinidadians as Trinidad and Tobago's largest ethnic group in the 2011 census?
Indo-Trinidadians
Indo-Trinidadians were 35.4% of the population in the 2011 census against 34.2% for Afro-Trinidadians, and party politics has long run along the same line, each main party drawing most of its votes from one group.
Q 13Who led Trinidad and Tobago to independence and served as prime minister until his death in 1981?
Q 21Trinidad and Tobago's flag is red with a diagonal band of which colour, edged in white?
Black
Black. Artist Carlisle Chang is credited with the design, chosen by the independence committee in 1962; the black stands for the people's strength and unity of purpose, the red for the sun's energy and the white for the sea.
Q 22Doubles, a street-food staple of Trinidad and Tobago, serves curried chickpeas in what?
Two fried flatbreads called bara
Two fried flatbreads called bara sandwich the curried chickpeas. For all the spice, doubles are mainly a breakfast food, bought from street vendors and dressed to order with pepper sauce, tamarind and kuchela.
Q 23Angostura bitters, made in Trinidad, are famous for what feature of their bottle?
Eric Williams
Eric Williams was an Oxford-trained historian before he was a politician: his 1944 book 'Capitalism and Slavery' argued that slavery's profits helped finance Britain's Industrial Revolution.
Q 14Which group stormed Trinidad and Tobago's Parliament in 1990 and held the government hostage for six days?
Jamaat al Muslimeen
Jamaat al Muslimeen, led by Yasin Abu Bakr, seized the Red House and the state television station on 27 July 1990 and gave up on 1 August; the government it had held captive was voted out the next year.
Q 15Who became Trinidad and Tobago's first female prime minister in 2010?
Kamla Persad-Bissessar
Kamla Persad-Bissessar led the People's Partnership coalition to victory in May 2010, lost office in 2015, and after ten years in opposition won the 2025 election to become prime minister again.
Q 16Unlike most Caribbean nations, Trinidad and Tobago's economy is based mainly on what?
Oil and gas
Oil and gas. Trinidad's first oil well was drilled in 1857, though commercial production waited until 1908; energy has since made the country one of the most prosperous in the Caribbean.
Q 17Pitch Lake at La Brea in south-west Trinidad is the world's largest natural deposit of what?
Asphalt
Asphalt, about 10 million tons of it, fills Pitch Lake to a depth of some 75 metres. Mined for road surfacing since the 1850s, the lake refills itself as fresh pitch wells up from below.
Q 18Which sea turtle comes ashore to nest on Trinidad's Matura and Grande Riviere beaches, among its most important nesting sites?
Leatherback
Leatherback, the largest turtle in the world. Villagers on these coasts once took the nesting females for food, but since 1990 the Matura group Nature Seekers has patrolled the beach to protect them and guides visitors.
Q 19Which noisy bird, nicknamed the Tobago pheasant, shares national-bird status with Trinidad's scarlet ibis?
The cocrico
The cocrico, a chachalaca whose flocks call loudly at dawn and dusk, stands for Tobago on the coat of arms, yet it is not found naturally on Trinidad at all.
Q 20Which wetland on Trinidad's west coast is famous for its evening roost of scarlet ibis?
Caroni Swamp
Caroni Swamp. Flocks of scarlet ibis fly in at dusk to roost in its mangroves; the birds hatch dull brown and turn red from the pigments in the crustaceans they eat there.
An oversized label
An oversized label is the bottle's signature, and the name misleads too: the bitters contain no angostura bark but are named for the town on the Orinoco where a German army surgeon first made them in 1824.
Q 24Which Trinidadian batsman made a Test score of 400 not out against England in 2004?
Brian Lara
Brian Lara made 400 not out for West Indies against England at St John's, Antigua, in 2004, reclaiming the Test record he had first set with 375 on the same ground ten years earlier.
Q 25Hasely Crawford won Trinidad and Tobago's first Olympic gold at the 1976 Montreal Games in which event?
Men's 100 metres
Hasely Crawford won the men's 100 metres from the inside lane, two hundredths of a second ahead of Don Quarrie, and came home a national hero: the national stadium now carries his name.
Q 26Trinidad and Tobago's football team, which played its first World Cup in 2006, is nicknamed after which music style?
Soca
Soca. The Soca Warriors, the smallest nation by population to have reached a World Cup until Iceland in 2018, held Sweden to a 0-0 draw in their first match despite playing most of the second half with ten men.
Q 27Tobago-born Dwight Yorke won the 1999 Treble with which English club?
Manchester United
Manchester United signed Dwight Yorke from Aston Villa in August 1998, and his partnership with Andy Cole fired the club to the Premier League, FA Cup and Champions League in his first season.
Q 28Which Trinidad-born author of 'A House for Mr Biswas' won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2001?
V. S. Naipaul
V. S. Naipaul left Trinidad for Oxford on a scholarship in 1950 and settled in England; he drew Mr Biswas, forever struggling for a house of his own, from the life of his father Seepersad.
Q 29Which rapper was born in Trinidad's Saint James district in 1982?
Nicki Minaj
Nicki Minaj was born Onika Maraj and lived with her grandmother in Saint James until her mother, who had gone ahead to New York, brought her to Queens at about five.
Q 30Janelle Commissiong of Trinidad and Tobago made history in 1977 as the first Black winner of which pageant?
Miss Universe
Miss Universe. Commissiong was crowned in Santo Domingo on 16 July 1977, and her win was no one-off for the islands: Wendy Fitzwilliam took the same title for Trinidad and Tobago in 1998.