VacationSelector

Alicante or Cardiff?

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

Your match

Alicante
✓ Best match
56
match

Wins on year-round weather and beaches & swimming with your weighting.

Cardiff
48
match

Wins on sights concentration and nature & day trips with your weighting.

What matters to you?

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

Scoreboard

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

AlicanteCardiff
Beaches & swimming. Alicante leads by 31 points.31
AlicanteCardiff
Score7746
Swim season months50
Beaches 10 km338
Coast distance1 km2 km
Water distance1 km2 km
Places to eat. Alicante leads by 6 points.6
AlicanteCardiff
Score6660
Restaurants within 2 km of centre867541
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km3132
Museums & heritage. Alicante leads by 3 points.3
AlicanteCardiff
Score4239
Museums within 10 km1461
Museums within 2 km of centre116
Share of museums within 2 km %7910
Unesco sites within 50 km21
Nightlife. Alicante leads by 3 points.3
AlicanteCardiff
Score5148
Drinking venues within 4 km591536
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre488395
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %8374
Nightclubs within 4 km5435
Nature & day trips. Cardiff leads by 10 points.10
AlicanteCardiff
Score4050
Protected land share 50 km %718
Landscape blanket share 50 km %015
Land share of disc %5968
Park area within 2 km60 hectares88 hectares
Good for families. Alicante leads by 10 points.10
AlicanteCardiff
Score4232
Tourist attractions within 2 km134
Park area within 2 km60 hectares88 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km12
Sights concentration. Cardiff leads by 19 points.19
AlicanteCardiff
Score2645
Notable places within 2 km1851
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Alicante leads by 17 points.17
AlicanteCardiff
Score7154
Price level global60.884.9
Daily budget€122
Year-round weather. Alicante leads by 33 points.33
AlicanteCardiff
Score8754
Monthly daytime high17 °C to 31.1 °C7.7 °C to 20.2 °C
Monthly rainfall3 mm to 52 mm49 mm to 87 mm
Dry months110
0255075100

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
Alicante
17
18
20
22
24
28
30
31
29
25
21
18
Cardiff
8
8
10
13
16
18
20
20
18
14
11
9
Sea temperature, °C
Alicante
15
14
15
16
18
22
25
26
25
22
19
16
Cardiff
8
7
8
9
12
15
17
18
17
15
12
9
Rainfall, mm
Alicante
21
18
25
34
21
8
3
12
52
32
34
23
Cardiff
77
55
49
54
56
56
61
66
54
87
83
79
Daylight, hours per day
Alicante
10
11
12
13
14
15
15
14
13
11
10
10
Cardiff
8
10
12
14
16
17
16
15
13
11
9
8
Sunshine, hours per day
Alicante
6
6
8
8
10
10
11
10
8
7
6
6
Cardiff
2
3
4
6
7
7
7
6
5
4
2
2

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. Alicante: 1991-2020 normals, Alicante (2.8 km from centre). Cardiff: 1991-2020 normals, Cardiff-Wales Airport (14.9 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromAlicanteCardiff
PalmaPMI
1 h 0 m
no fares
ALC · 10 km
2 h 20 m
no fares
BRS · 34 km
BarcelonaBCN
1 h 10 m
€62-93
ALC · 10 km
2 h 5 m
no fares
BRS · 34 km
IbizaIBZ
55 m
no fares
ALC · 10 km
2 h 20 m
no fares
BRS · 34 km
AmsterdamAMS
2 h 35 m
€150-169
1 stop
ALC · 10 km
1 h 20 m
no fares
CWL · 15 km
MadridMAD
1 h 5 m
€72-86
ALC · 10 km
2 h 5 m
no fares
BRS · 34 km
GenevaGVA
1 h 55 m
no fares
ALC · 10 km
1 h 40 m
no fares
BRS · 34 km
Las PalmasLPA
2 h 40 m
no fares
RMU · 82 km
4 h 0 m
no fares
BRS · 34 km
ArrecifeACE
2 h 40 m
no fares
VLC · 127 km
3 h 45 m
no fares
BRS · 34 km
MilanMXP, BGY, LIN
2 h 0 m
€62-83
ALC · 10 km
1 h 55 m
€85-113
1 stop
BRS · 34 km
MarrakechRAK
1 h 50 m
no fares
ALC · 10 km
3 h 20 m
no fares
BRS · 34 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

MeasureAlicanteCardiff
Official languageSpanishEnglish
CurrencyEuro (EUR)Pound Sterling (GBP)
SocketsCF230 V, 50 HzG230 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideRightLeft
Time zoneUTC+1, UTC+2 in summerUTC, UTC+1 in summer
Emergency number112112 or 999
Elevation3 m41 m
Main airportAlicante-Elche Miguel Hernández Airport (ALC)10 km from centre124 non-stop destinationsCardiff International Airport (CWL)15 km from centre8 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year13 days8 days

By the numbers

MeasureAlicanteCardiff
City population366,221383,536
People per km²1,8192,734
Museums within 10 km89
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km21
Distinct cuisines in the centre5255
Swim season, months above 21 °C5 monthsNone

Where else could you go?

Every comparison below shares a destination with this one, so you can follow Alicante or Cardiff 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). 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. Exchange rates via Frankfurter, based on European Central Bank reference rates. 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.