VacationSelector

Aarhus or Reykjavik?

Two destinations compared on nine measures of openly sourced data. Weight what matters to you and the verdict follows.

Your match

Too close to call, 2 points apart

Aarhus
44
match

Wins on year-round weather and nightlife with your weighting.

Reykjavik
46
match

Wins on nature & day trips and museums & heritage with your weighting.

What matters to you?

Pick a travel style or drag the sliders. The match scores above update as you do.

The verdict

Choose Aarhus if you want the warmer, drier trip, with summer highs reaching 22°C, and evenings with a wide choice of bars and clubs a short walk apart.

Choose Reykjavik if the countryside is the point of going: 16% of the land around it is protected, and the centre holds more museums and more notable places within walking distance.

Scoreboard

Each measure scored 0 to 100. Open a row for the figures behind the score.

AarhusReykjavik
Beaches & swimming. Reykjavik leads by 1 points.1
AarhusReykjavik
Score5960
Swim season months00
Beaches 10 km2833
Coast distance0 km0 km
Water distance0 km0 km
Places to eat. Aarhus leads by 4 points.4
AarhusReykjavik
Score5349
Restaurants within 2 km of centre427261
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km2629
Museums & heritage. Reykjavik leads by 12 points.12
AarhusReykjavik
Score3850
Museums within 10 km2634
Museums within 2 km of centre2023
Share of museums within 2 km %7768
Unesco sites within 50 km01
Nightlife. Aarhus leads by 13 points.13
AarhusReykjavik
Score4027
Drinking venues within 4 km382192
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre330166
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %8686
Nightclubs within 4 km1510
Nature & day trips. Reykjavik leads by 31 points.31
AarhusReykjavik
Score2859
Protected land share 50 km %216
Landscape blanket share 50 km %00
Land share of disc %6856
Park area within 2 km72 hectares28 hectares
Good for families. Reykjavik leads by 9 points.9
AarhusReykjavik
Score3342
Tourist attractions within 2 km621
Park area within 2 km72 hectares28 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km11
Sights concentration. Reykjavik leads by 11 points.11
AarhusReykjavik
Score3748
Notable places within 2 km3361
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Aarhus leads by 11 points.11
AarhusReykjavik
Score5241
Price level global87.8102.8
Daily budget€214€243
Year-round weather. Aarhus leads by 16 points.16
AarhusReykjavik
Score5337
Monthly daytime high3.7 °C to 21.6 °C3.2 °C to 14.9 °C
Monthly rainfall33 mm to 74 mm41 mm to 97 mm
Dry months30
0255075100

Where they differ

Aarhus is the warmer city right through the year, with daytime highs of 4-22°C against Reykjavik's 3-15°C, and three months where rain stays at 40mm or less while Reykjavik has none. Evenings are the other gap: noticeably more places to drink and more nightclubs, most of them near the centre, plus far more park space close in.

Reykjavik's advantage is what surrounds it. 16% of the land around the city is protected against 2% around Aarhus, so day trips into open country are the reason to come.

Where they are alike

Both sit on the water, with the sea 0km from either centre, 33 beaches around Reykjavik and 28 around Aarhus. Neither gets a month with the sea at 21°C or above, so swimming is brief and bracing in both.

Eating out and family travel are close too. The range of kitchens is similar, even if Aarhus has more restaurants near the centre, and each city has one theme park within reach.

Which traveller are you?

If day trips are the reason you travel, take Reykjavik. With 16% of the surrounding land protected, the trip is built around what lies outside the city rather than the streets themselves.

If you want a night out and a wide choice of tables, take Aarhus. It has more restaurants near the centre and clearly more bars and clubs, most within walking distance of each other.

Families can go either way. Reykjavik packs far more attractions near the centre and has more museums; Aarhus offers much more park space and warmer summers, peaking at 22°C. Each has one theme park within reach.

What the numbers don't tell you

The daily budget figures, €214 for Denmark and €243 for Iceland, are national price levels for restaurants and hotels, not measurements of either city. A capital or a heavily visited place can sit far from its own country's average, by more than the gap between these two figures, so neither number tells you which trip will cost more.

Sunshine is not recorded near Aarhus, so that figure is missing rather than low, and one side of the weather comparison is simply unmeasured. Both cities also look well supplied with beaches, but neither sea reaches 21°C in any month.

When should you go?

The figures behind each month. Each row is shaded against that destination's own year, so the deepest cell is its best month for that measure and the palest its weakest. Shades are not comparable between the two rows.

J
F
M
A
M
J
J
A
S
O
N
D
Daytime high, °C
Aarhus
4
4
7
12
16
19
22
21
17
12
8
5
Reykjavik
3
3
4
7
10
13
15
14
11
8
5
3
Sea temperature, °C
Aarhus
3
2
3
6
11
15
17
18
15
12
8
5
Reykjavik
5
5
5
6
7
10
11
11
10
8
7
6
Rainfall, mm
Aarhus
51
37
36
33
46
64
62
74
66
68
55
50
Reykjavik
86
87
84
56
49
41
50
66
87
80
86
97
Daylight, hours per day
Aarhus
8
10
12
14
16
18
17
15
13
11
8
7
Reykjavik
6
9
12
15
18
21
20
16
13
10
7
4
Sunshine, hours per day
Aarhus
No sunshine record
Reykjavik
1
2
4
5
7
6
6
5
4
3
1
0

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. Aarhus: 1991-2020 normals, Tirstrup (29.8 km from centre). Reykjavik: 1991-2020 normals, Reykjavik (2.3 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Aarhus is the better bet through summer, warmest in July at 22°C, with the sea at its best in August, 18°C. Late summer is also the wettest stretch, near 74mm, so early summer is the drier half of the window.

Reykjavik's window is narrower. Its warmest months, June and July, reach 13-15°C, and June is also the driest at 41mm. Autumn and winter are persistently wet, up to 97mm, with little warmth to offset it.

Getting there

Flying fromAarhusReykjavik
AmsterdamAMS
1 h 15 m
no fares
BLL · 80 km
3 h 5 m
€293-407
2 stops
KEF · 37 km
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
1 h 45 m
no fares
AAR · 30 km
2 h 55 m
€245-283
1 stop
KEF · 37 km
FrankfurtFRA, HHN
1 h 25 m
no fares
BLL · 80 km
3 h 30 m
€313-393
2 stops
KEF · 37 km
CopenhagenCPH
50 m
no fares
AAR · 30 km
3 h 10 m
€216-282
1 stop
KEF · 37 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
1 h 40 m
no fares
BLL · 80 km
3 h 20 m
€247-346
1 stop
KEF · 37 km
MunichMUC
1 h 40 m
no fares
BLL · 80 km
3 h 50 m
€275-453
1 stop
KEF · 37 km
ManchesterMAN
1 h 35 m
no fares
BLL · 80 km
2 h 35 m
€227-256
KEF · 37 km
OsloOSL, TRF
1 h 10 m
no fares
AAR · 30 km
2 h 45 m
no fares
KEF · 37 km
StockholmARN, BMA, NYO, VST
1 h 30 m
no fares
BLL · 80 km
3 h 10 m
€174-231
1 stop
KEF · 37 km
NuukGOH
4 h 40 m
no fares
BLL · 80 km
2 h 20 m
no fares
KEF · 37 km

The busiest departure cities for these two, with a place kept for each other part of the world. Busiest means arriving passengers where an official count exists, and where none does, the number of non-stop services flown: official route statistics are published by the European reporting countries and by nobody else, so a table ranked on them alone would offer a reader in New York or Tokyo ten European cities. Flying times are estimated from the distance between airports, and every row is a city flown non-stop to both. Where the typical offer connects anyway, the stops are shown. Under each figure is the airport the flight lands at and how far that is from the centre, because the nearest airport is not always the one a route is flown to. Where both columns name the same airport it is one flight, and the difference between the two is the distance printed beside it. Typical return fares for 2026-08 to 2026-10, cached market data up to 7 days old. The figure is the middle half of the offers found, so a single price means they agreed and a range means they did not; for a typical route that middle half spans about a quarter of the median, and for the least settled routes rather more than the median itself.

Before you go

MeasureAarhusReykjavik
Official languageDanishIcelandic
CurrencyDanish Krone (DKK)Iceland Krona (ISK)
SocketsCEFK230 V, 50 HzCF230 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideRightRight
Time zoneUTC+1, UTC+2 in summerUTC
Emergency number112112
Elevation6 m8 m
Main airportAarhus Airport (AAR)30 km from centre14 non-stop destinationsKeflavik International Airport (KEF)37 km from centre88 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year14 days16 days

By the numbers

MeasureAarhusReykjavik
City population290,598138,772
People per km²3,193569
Museums within 10 km1723
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km01
Distinct cuisines in the centre3742
Swim season, months above 21 °CNoneNone

Where else could you go?

Every comparison below shares a destination with this one, so you can follow Aarhus or Reykjavik somewhere new.

Browse every destination we have measured

Sources

© OpenStreetMap contributors, data available under the Open Database Licence. Place counts include data from Overture Maps Foundation (CDLA Permissive 2.0), assembled from Meta, Microsoft, Foursquare and other providers. Notable-place counts from Wikidata (CC0), weighted by Wikipedia language editions. Structured data from Wikidata (CC0). Weather data by Meteostat. Meteorological data provided by NOAA, DWD and others. Sea surface temperature from NOAA OISST v2.1, NOAA Physical Sciences Laboratory. Airport data from OurAirports (public domain). Tourism statistics from Eurostat, © European Union, reused under CC BY 4.0. Public holidays from Nager.Date (MIT). Exchange rates via Frankfurter, based on European Central Bank reference rates. Non-stop route lists from the "Airlines and destinations" tables on English Wikipedia airport articles, by Wikipedia contributors, reused under CC BY-SA 4.0. Currency from the ISO 4217 register maintained by SIX, cross-checked against country data from GeoNames (CC BY 4.0). Price level from World Bank open data (PPP conversion factor for private consumption and official exchange rate), CC BY 4.0. Time zones from GeoNames (CC BY 4.0); clock offsets computed from the IANA time zone database. Daylight hours computed from each destination's latitude using the NOAA solar position algorithm. Typical fares from Travelpayouts (Aviasales data). Route-level air passenger statistics from Eurostat, © European Union, reused under CC BY 4.0.

Scores follow rubric v2; snapshot generated 2026-08-31. Typical prices can be up to 7 days old. Daily budgets are estimates from country price levels.