VacationSelector

Alicante or Dresden?

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 year-round weather with your weighting.

Dresden
48
match

Wins on sights concentration and good for families 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.

AlicanteDresden
Beaches & swimming. Alicante leads by 77 points.77
AlicanteDresden
Score770
Swim season months50
Beaches 10 km3322
Coast distance1 km267 km
Water distance1 km
Places to eat. Alicante leads by 5 points.5
AlicanteDresden
Score6661
Restaurants within 2 km of centre867422
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km3142
Museums & heritage. Dresden leads by 12 points.12
AlicanteDresden
Score4254
Museums within 10 km1466
Museums within 2 km of centre1134
Share of museums within 2 km %7952
Unesco sites within 50 km21
Nightlife. Alicante leads by 9 points.9
AlicanteDresden
Score5142
Drinking venues within 4 km591359
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre488265
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %8374
Nightclubs within 4 km5443
Nature & day trips. Alicante leads by 1 points.1
AlicanteDresden
Score4039
Protected land share 50 km %714
Landscape blanket share 50 km %09
Land share of disc %59100
Park area within 2 km60 hectares80 hectares
Good for families. Dresden leads by 17 points.17
AlicanteDresden
Score4259
Tourist attractions within 2 km1332
Park area within 2 km60 hectares80 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km12
Sights concentration. Dresden leads by 27 points.27
AlicanteDresden
Score2653
Notable places within 2 km1882
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Alicante leads by 11 points.11
AlicanteDresden
Score7160
Price level global60.875.9
Daily budget€122€163
Year-round weather. Alicante leads by 25 points.25
AlicanteDresden
Score8762
Monthly daytime high17 °C to 31.1 °C4 °C to 26.2 °C
Monthly rainfall3 mm to 52 mm31 mm to 83 mm
Dry months114
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
Dresden
4
6
10
17
21
24
26
26
21
15
9
6
Sea temperature, °C
Alicante
15
14
15
16
18
22
25
26
25
22
19
16
Dresden
No coastline within reach
Rainfall, mm
Alicante
21
18
25
34
21
8
3
12
52
32
34
23
Dresden
46
31
36
36
64
72
80
83
55
49
40
45
Daylight, hours per day
Alicante
10
11
12
13
14
15
15
14
13
11
10
10
Dresden
9
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
Dresden
2
3
4
6
7
7
7
7
6
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). Dresden: 1991-2020 normals, Dresden-Strehlen (3.8 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromAlicanteDresden
AmsterdamAMS
2 h 35 m
€150-169
1 stop
ALC · 10 km
1 h 30 m
€163-247
PRG · 112 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
2 h 5 m
€85-109
ALC · 10 km
1 h 40 m
€86-113
PRG · 112 km
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
2 h 25 m
€46-56
ALC · 10 km
1 h 40 m
no fares
LEJ · 113 km
BrusselsBRU, CRL
2 h 25 m
€102-119
1 stop
ALC · 10 km
1 h 30 m
€61-116
PRG · 112 km
BarcelonaBCN
1 h 10 m
€62-93
ALC · 10 km
2 h 15 m
€111-155
PRG · 112 km
MilanMXP, BGY, LIN
2 h 0 m
€62-83
ALC · 10 km
1 h 25 m
€57-79
PRG · 112 km
RomeFCO, CIA
2 h 0 m
€102-136
1 stop
ALC · 10 km
1 h 45 m
€62-97
PRG · 112 km
ManchesterMAN
2 h 40 m
no fares
ALC · 10 km
1 h 55 m
€128-224
1 stop
BER · 147 km
MarrakechRAK
1 h 50 m
no fares
ALC · 10 km
3 h 55 m
no fares
PRG · 112 km
MontrealYUL, YHU, YMX
7 h 30 m
no fares
VLC · 127 km
7 h 45 m
no fares
BER · 147 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

MeasureAlicanteDresden
Official languageSpanishGerman
CurrencyEuro (EUR)Euro (EUR)
SocketsCF230 V, 50 HzCF230 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideRightRight
Time zoneUTC+1, UTC+2 in summerUTC+1, UTC+2 in summer
Emergency number112112
Elevation3 m126 m
Main airportAlicante-Elche Miguel Hernández Airport (ALC)10 km from centre124 non-stop destinationsDresden Airport (DRS)10 km from centre12 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year13 days11 days

By the numbers

MeasureAlicanteDresden
City population366,221564,904
People per km²1,8191,720
Museums within 10 km870
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km21
Distinct cuisines in the centre5277
Swim season, months above 21 °C5 months

Where else could you go?

Every comparison below shares a destination with this one, so you can follow Alicante or Dresden 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.