VacationSelector

Alicante or Galway?

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 places to eat with your weighting.

Galway
39
match

Wins on 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.

AlicanteGalway
Beaches & swimming. Alicante leads by 26 points.26
AlicanteGalway
Score7751
Swim season months50
Beaches 10 km3313
Coast distance1 km1 km
Water distance1 km1 km
Places to eat. Alicante leads by 29 points.29
AlicanteGalway
Score6637
Restaurants within 2 km of centre867173
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km3120
Museums & heritage. Alicante leads by 22 points.22
AlicanteGalway
Score4220
Museums within 10 km145
Museums within 2 km of centre115
Share of museums within 2 km %79100
Unesco sites within 50 km20
Nightlife. Alicante leads by 25 points.25
AlicanteGalway
Score5126
Drinking venues within 4 km591185
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre488153
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %8383
Nightclubs within 4 km548
Nature & day trips. Galway leads by 15 points.15
AlicanteGalway
Score4055
Protected land share 50 km %7—
Landscape blanket share 50 km %00
Land share of disc %5985
Park area within 2 km60 hectares65 hectares
Good for families. Alicante leads by 17 points.17
AlicanteGalway
Score4225
Tourist attractions within 2 km135
Park area within 2 km60 hectares65 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km10
Sights concentration. Alicante leads by 4 points.4
AlicanteGalway
Score2622
Notable places within 2 km1814
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Alicante leads by 14 points.14
AlicanteGalway
Score7157
Price level global60.880.2
Daily budget€122€187
Year-round weather. Alicante leads by 33 points.33
AlicanteGalway
Score8754
Monthly daytime high17 °C to 31.1 °C8.9 °C to 19.6 °C
Monthly rainfall3 mm to 52 mm63 mm to 113 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
Galway
9
10
11
14
16
19
20
19
18
14
11
9
Sea temperature, °C
Alicante
15
14
15
16
18
22
25
26
25
22
19
16
Galway
9
9
9
10
12
14
16
16
15
14
12
10
Rainfall, mm
Alicante
21
18
25
34
21
8
3
12
52
32
34
23
Galway
100
87
76
63
63
72
76
89
77
101
104
113
Daylight, hours per day
Alicante
10
11
12
13
14
15
15
14
13
11
10
10
Galway
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
Galway
2
2
4
5
6
5
4
5
4
3
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). Galway: 1991-2020 normals, Shannon Airport (64.2 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromAlicanteGalway
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
2 h 25 m
€46-56
ALC · 10 km
1 h 20 m
no fares
SNN · 64 km
ManchesterMAN
2 h 40 m
no fares
ALC · 10 km
1 h 10 m
no fares
SNN · 64 km
DublinDUB
2 h 45 m
€98-122
1 stop
ALC · 10 km
1 h 0 m
no fares
KIR · 125 km
PalmaPMI
1 h 0 m
no fares
ALC · 10 km
2 h 40 m
no fares
SNN · 64 km
BirminghamBHX
2 h 30 m
€69-172
ALC · 10 km
1 h 15 m
no fares
SNN · 64 km
BristolBRS
2 h 25 m
€66-103
ALC · 10 km
1 h 15 m
no fares
NOC · 73 km
NottinghamEMA
2 h 35 m
no fares
ALC · 10 km
1 h 15 m
no fares
NOC · 73 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
2 h 5 m
€85-109
ALC · 10 km
1 h 45 m
no fares
SNN · 64 km
EdinburghEDI
3 h 0 m
no fares
ALC · 10 km
1 h 15 m
no fares
SNN · 64 km
LiverpoolLPL
2 h 40 m
no fares
ALC · 10 km
1 h 10 m
no fares
SNN · 64 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

MeasureAlicanteGalway
Official languageSpanishEnglish, Irish
CurrencyEuro (EUR)Euro (EUR)
SocketsCF230 V, 50 HzG230 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideRightLeft
Time zoneUTC+1, UTC+2 in summerUTC, UTC+1 in summer
Emergency number112112
Elevation3 m25 m
Main airportAlicante-Elche Miguel Hernández Airport (ALC)10 km from centre124 non-stop destinationsShannon Airport (SNN)64 km from centre36 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year13 days11 days

By the numbers

MeasureAlicanteGalway
City population366,22183,456
People per km²1,8191,563
Museums within 10 km84
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km20
Distinct cuisines in the centre5225
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 Galway 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.