VacationSelector

Alicante or Granada?

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.

Granada
53
match

Wins on nature & day trips 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.

The verdict

Choose Alicante if the sea is the point: 33 beaches nearby, water warm enough to swim for 5 months, and a year that stays mild and mostly dry.

Choose Granada if you would rather walk between monuments and museums and head out into protected country on day trips, accepting hotter summers, cooler wetter winters and no coast at all.

Scoreboard

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

AlicanteGranada
Beaches & swimming. Alicante leads by 77 points.77
AlicanteGranada
Score770
Swim season months50
Beaches 10 km330
Coast distance1 km48 km
Water distance1 km—
Places to eat. Granada leads by 1 points.1
AlicanteGranada
Score6667
Restaurants within 2 km of centre867872
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km3134
Museums & heritage. Granada leads by 6 points.6
AlicanteGranada
Score4248
Museums within 10 km1428
Museums within 2 km of centre1126
Share of museums within 2 km %7993
Unesco sites within 50 km21
Nightlife. Granada leads by 1 points.1
AlicanteGranada
Score5152
Drinking venues within 4 km591637
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre488494
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %8378
Nightclubs within 4 km5446
Nature & day trips. Granada leads by 23 points.23
AlicanteGranada
Score4063
Protected land share 50 km %727
Landscape blanket share 50 km %00
Land share of disc %5996
Park area within 2 km60 hectares46 hectares
Good for families. Granada leads by 14 points.14
AlicanteGranada
Score4256
Tourist attractions within 2 km1360
Park area within 2 km60 hectares46 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km10
Sights concentration. Granada leads by 18 points.18
AlicanteGranada
Score2644
Notable places within 2 km1850
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Alicante and Granada are level on 71.
AlicanteGranada
Score7171
Price level global60.860.8
Daily budget€122€122
Year-round weather. Alicante leads by 13 points.13
AlicanteGranada
Score8774
Monthly daytime high17 °C to 31.1 °C13.1 °C to 34.8 °C
Monthly rainfall3 mm to 52 mm0 mm to 51 mm
Dry months117
0255075100

Where they differ

Alicante is the coastal choice: 33 beaches nearby and sea warm enough to swim for 5 months, peaking at 26°C in August. It also has more park space near the centre than Granada, and 1 theme park within reach where Granada has none.

Granada has about three times as many notable places within walking distance of the centre and roughly twice as many museums, and it is the better base for open country: 27% of the land around it is protected against 7% around Alicante.

Where they are alike

Eating out is where they match most closely: a similar number of restaurants near the centre in each, and a similar range of kitchens.

Nightlife is close as well, with a comparable number of drinking places in both, most of them near the centre, though Alicante holds somewhat more clubs. Heritage is not far apart either: Granada has more museums, while Alicante has 2 UNESCO-listed places within day-trip reach against Granada's 1.

Which traveller are you?

If swimming is the point of the trip, Alicante: beaches on the doorstep, sea at 26°C in August and water warm enough for 5 months, against a city with no coast at all.

If you want to walk between monuments and museums without using transport, Granada: about three times as many notable places within walking distance of the centre, and roughly twice the museums.

For walking and day trips into open country, Granada again, with 27% of the surrounding land protected. Families with young children may prefer Alicante's park space near the centre and its 1 theme park within reach.

What the numbers don't tell you

The value reading is a national price level applied to both cities, so it is identical by construction and carries no information about which trip costs less. The €122 daily budget beside it is one national estimate rather than a measurement of either city, so treat the local cost difference as unknown.

Alicante's steady weather hides an uneven rain pattern: September alone brings 52mm. Granada's yearly sunshine covers a spread of 13-35°C, with the hottest and driest weeks arriving together. And a large beach count says nothing about how crowded that coast is in August.

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
Granada
13
15
18
20
25
31
35
34
29
24
17
14
Sea temperature, °C
Alicante
15
14
15
16
18
22
25
26
25
22
19
16
Granada
No coastline within reach
Rainfall, mm
Alicante
21
18
25
34
21
8
3
12
52
32
34
23
Granada
39
33
45
44
29
6
0
3
28
45
51
44
Daylight, hours per day
Alicante
10
11
12
13
14
15
15
14
13
11
10
10
Granada
10
11
12
13
14
15
14
14
13
11
10
10
Sunshine, hours per day
Alicante
6
6
8
8
10
10
11
10
8
7
6
6
Granada
6
6
7
8
10
12
13
11
8
7
5
5

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. Alicante: 1991-2020 normals, Alicante (2.8 km from centre). Granada: 1991-2020 normals, Granada / Caserío Hospicio (5 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Alicante is best in May and June: highs of 24-28°C, 8-21mm of rain and the sea already at 22°C. August brings the warmest water, 26°C, while September is the wettest month at 52mm, more than any other month there.

Granada suits May, then September into October, when highs ease to 24-29°C after the summer peak. July is almost rainless but reaches 35°C. Winter is cool and wet, 13-15°C with 33-51mm a month.

Getting there

Flying fromAlicanteGranada
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
2 h 25 m
€46-56
ALC · 10 km
2 h 40 m
€67-129
AGP · 97 km
BrusselsBRU, CRL
2 h 25 m
€102-119
1 stop
ALC · 10 km
2 h 45 m
€110-142
1 stop
AGP · 97 km
ManchesterMAN
2 h 40 m
no fares
ALC · 10 km
2 h 50 m
no fares
AGP · 97 km
AmsterdamAMS
2 h 35 m
€150-169
1 stop
ALC · 10 km
2 h 55 m
€146-177
AGP · 97 km
DublinDUB
2 h 45 m
€98-122
1 stop
ALC · 10 km
2 h 50 m
€122-139
1 stop
AGP · 97 km
BarcelonaBCN
1 h 10 m
€62-93
ALC · 10 km
1 h 30 m
€92-138
GRX · 16 km
StockholmARN, BMA, NYO, VST
3 h 50 m
€96-151
ALC · 10 km
4 h 15 m
€112-120
AGP · 97 km
BristolBRS
2 h 25 m
€66-103
ALC · 10 km
2 h 35 m
no fares
AGP · 97 km
MarrakechRAK
1 h 50 m
no fares
ALC · 10 km
1 h 25 m
€58-149
AGP · 97 km
MontrealYUL, YHU, YMX
7 h 30 m
no fares
VLC · 127 km
7 h 25 m
no fares
AGP · 97 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

MeasureAlicanteGranada
Official languageSpanishSpanish
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 m693 m
Main airportAlicante-Elche Miguel Hernández Airport (ALC)10 km from centre124 non-stop destinationsF.G.L. Airport Granada-Jaén Airport (GRX)16 km from centre12 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year13 days12 days

By the numbers

MeasureAlicanteGranada
City population366,221233,975
People per km²1,8192,659
Museums within 10 km819
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km21
Distinct cuisines in the centre5262
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 Granada 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.