VacationSelector

Alicante or Edinburgh?

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

Alicante
56
match

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

Edinburgh
58
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.

AlicanteEdinburgh
Beaches & swimming. Alicante leads by 22 points.22
AlicanteEdinburgh
Score7755
Swim season months50
Beaches 10 km3320
Coast distance1 km3 km
Water distance1 km3 km
Places to eat. Edinburgh leads by 4 points.4
AlicanteEdinburgh
Score6670
Restaurants within 2 km of centre8671,023
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km3135
Museums & heritage. Edinburgh leads by 15 points.15
AlicanteEdinburgh
Score4257
Museums within 10 km1430
Museums within 2 km of centre1122
Share of museums within 2 km %7973
Unesco sites within 50 km23
Nightlife. Edinburgh leads by 13 points.13
AlicanteEdinburgh
Score5164
Drinking venues within 4 km5911,193
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre488884
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %8374
Nightclubs within 4 km5465
Nature & day trips. Alicante leads by 5 points.5
AlicanteEdinburgh
Score4035
Protected land share 50 km %72
Landscape blanket share 50 km %01
Land share of disc %5985
Park area within 2 km60 hectares166 hectares
Good for families. Edinburgh leads by 30 points.30
AlicanteEdinburgh
Score4272
Tourist attractions within 2 km1387
Park area within 2 km60 hectares166 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km10
Sights concentration. Edinburgh leads by 34 points.34
AlicanteEdinburgh
Score2660
Notable places within 2 km18126
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Alicante leads by 17 points.17
AlicanteEdinburgh
Score7154
Price level global60.884.9
Daily budget€122
Year-round weather. Alicante leads by 36 points.36
AlicanteEdinburgh
Score8751
Monthly daytime high17 °C to 31.1 °C6.6 °C to 18.8 °C
Monthly rainfall3 mm to 52 mm43 mm to 80 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
Edinburgh
7
7
9
12
14
17
19
19
17
13
9
7
Sea temperature, °C
Alicante
15
14
15
16
18
22
25
26
25
22
19
16
Edinburgh
7
6
6
7
10
12
14
14
13
12
10
8
Rainfall, mm
Alicante
21
18
25
34
21
8
3
12
52
32
34
23
Edinburgh
62
47
47
43
49
63
65
69
55
80
68
63
Daylight, hours per day
Alicante
10
11
12
13
14
15
15
14
13
11
10
10
Edinburgh
8
10
12
14
16
18
17
15
13
11
8
7
Sunshine, hours per day
Alicante
6
6
8
8
10
10
11
10
8
7
6
6
Edinburgh
2
3
4
5
6
5
5
5
4
3
3
2

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. Alicante: 1991-2020 normals, Alicante (2.8 km from centre). Edinburgh: 1991-2020 normals, Edinburgh Airport (10 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromAlicanteEdinburgh
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
2 h 25 m
€46-56
ALC · 10 km
1 h 20 m
€41-45
EDI · 11 km
PalmaPMI
1 h 0 m
no fares
ALC · 10 km
2 h 55 m
no fares
EDI · 11 km
BrusselsBRU, CRL
2 h 25 m
€102-119
1 stop
ALC · 10 km
1 h 35 m
no fares
EDI · 11 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
2 h 5 m
€85-109
ALC · 10 km
1 h 40 m
€78-108
1 stop
EDI · 11 km
BarcelonaBCN
1 h 10 m
€62-93
ALC · 10 km
2 h 40 m
€58-103
1 stop
EDI · 11 km
AmsterdamAMS
2 h 35 m
€150-169
1 stop
ALC · 10 km
1 h 25 m
€117-158
EDI · 11 km
MilanMXP, BGY, LIN
2 h 0 m
€62-83
ALC · 10 km
2 h 20 m
€75-101
1 stop
EDI · 11 km
BelfastBFS, BHD
2 h 50 m
no fares
ALC · 10 km
55 m
no fares
EDI · 11 km
MarrakechRAK
1 h 50 m
no fares
ALC · 10 km
3 h 55 m
no fares
EDI · 11 km
MontrealYUL, YHU, YMX
7 h 30 m
no fares
VLC · 127 km
6 h 25 m
no fares
EDI · 11 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

MeasureAlicanteEdinburgh
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 m47 m
Main airportAlicante-Elche Miguel Hernández Airport (ALC)10 km from centre124 non-stop destinationsEdinburgh Airport (EDI)11 km from centre158 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year13 days10 days

By the numbers

MeasureAlicanteEdinburgh
City population366,221488,050
People per km²1,8191,884
Museums within 10 km832
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km23
Distinct cuisines in the centre5278
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 Edinburgh 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.