VacationSelector

Alicante or Catania?

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 beaches & swimming and places to eat with your weighting.

Catania
52
match

Wins on museums & heritage and sights concentration 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.

AlicanteCatania
Beaches & swimming. Alicante leads by 19 points.19
AlicanteCatania
Score7758
Swim season months55
Beaches 10 km335
Coast distance1 km1 km
Water distance1 km1 km
Places to eat. Alicante leads by 17 points.17
AlicanteCatania
Score6649
Restaurants within 2 km of centre867637
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km3114
Museums & heritage. Catania leads by 17 points.17
AlicanteCatania
Score4259
Museums within 10 km1434
Museums within 2 km of centre1127
Share of museums within 2 km %7979
Unesco sites within 50 km23
Nightlife. Alicante leads by 4 points.4
AlicanteCatania
Score5147
Drinking venues within 4 km591537
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre488403
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %8375
Nightclubs within 4 km5418
Nature & day trips. Alicante leads by 9 points.9
AlicanteCatania
Score4031
Protected land share 50 km %710
Landscape blanket share 50 km %00
Land share of disc %5961
Park area within 2 km60 hectares11 hectares
Good for families. Alicante leads by 6 points.6
AlicanteCatania
Score4236
Tourist attractions within 2 km1325
Park area within 2 km60 hectares11 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km11
Sights concentration. Catania leads by 13 points.13
AlicanteCatania
Score2639
Notable places within 2 km1837
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Alicante leads by 3 points.3
AlicanteCatania
Score7168
Price level global60.864.9
Daily budget€122€155
Year-round weather. Alicante leads by 10 points.10
AlicanteCatania
Score8777
Monthly daytime high17 °C to 31.1 °C15.8 °C to 34.5 °C
Monthly rainfall3 mm to 52 mm9 mm to 83 mm
Dry months115
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
Catania
16
16
19
21
26
31
34
35
30
26
21
17
Sea temperature, °C
Alicante
15
14
15
16
18
22
25
26
25
22
19
16
Catania
15
15
15
16
18
22
25
26
25
23
20
17
Rainfall, mm
Alicante
21
18
25
34
21
8
3
12
52
32
34
23
Catania
65
45
42
32
18
11
9
9
49
51
71
83
Daylight, hours per day
Alicante
10
11
12
13
14
15
15
14
13
11
10
10
Catania
10
11
12
13
14
15
15
14
13
11
10
10
Sunshine, hours per day
Alicante
6
6
8
8
10
10
11
10
8
7
6
6
Catania
4
5
6
7
9
10
11
10
7
6
5
4

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. Alicante: 1991-2020 normals, Alicante (2.8 km from centre). Catania: 1991-2020 normals, Catania / Sigonella (18.9 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromAlicanteCatania
MilanMXP, BGY, LIN
2 h 0 m
€62-83
ALC · 10 km
1 h 55 m
€45-94
CTA · 4 km
RomeFCO, CIA
2 h 0 m
€102-136
1 stop
ALC · 10 km
1 h 20 m
€38-50
CTA · 4 km
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
2 h 25 m
€46-56
ALC · 10 km
3 h 0 m
€106-144
1 stop
CTA · 4 km
BrusselsBRU, CRL
2 h 25 m
€102-119
1 stop
ALC · 10 km
2 h 40 m
€107-112
1 stop
CTA · 4 km
ManchesterMAN
2 h 40 m
no fares
ALC · 10 km
3 h 15 m
no fares
REG · 80 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
2 h 5 m
€85-109
ALC · 10 km
2 h 35 m
€91-153
1 stop
CTA · 4 km
BolognaBLQ
2 h 0 m
€92-98
1 stop
VLC · 127 km
1 h 40 m
€38-100
CTA · 4 km
AmsterdamAMS
2 h 35 m
€150-169
1 stop
ALC · 10 km
2 h 50 m
€201-205
CTA · 4 km
BarcelonaBCN
1 h 10 m
€62-93
ALC · 10 km
2 h 5 m
€89-123
1 stop
CTA · 4 km
MontrealYUL, YHU, YMX
7 h 30 m
no fares
VLC · 127 km
9 h 0 m
no fares
CTA · 4 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

MeasureAlicanteCatania
Official languageSpanishItalian
CurrencyEuro (EUR)Euro (EUR)
SocketsCF230 V, 50 HzCFL230 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideRightRight
Time zoneUTC+1, UTC+2 in summerUTC+1, UTC+2 in summer
Emergency number112112
Elevation3 m7 m
Main airportAlicante-Elche Miguel Hernández Airport (ALC)10 km from centre124 non-stop destinationsCatania-Fontanarossa Airport (CTA)4 km from centre95 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year13 days13 days

By the numbers

MeasureAlicanteCatania
City population366,221311,584
People per km²1,8191,704
Museums within 10 km825
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km23
Distinct cuisines in the centre5230
Swim season, months above 21 °C5 months5 months

Where else could you go?

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

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.