VacationSelector

Alicante or London?

Two destinations compared on nine measures of openly sourced data. Weight what matters to you and the verdict follows.

Your match

Alicante
56
match

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

London
✓ Best match
64
match

Wins on sights concentration and nightlife 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.

AlicanteLondon
Beaches & swimming. Alicante leads by 77 points.77
AlicanteLondon
Score770
Swim season months50
Beaches 10 km3347
Coast distance1 km43 km
Water distance1 km
Places to eat. London leads by 22 points.22
AlicanteLondon
Score6688
Restaurants within 2 km of centre8673,317
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km3140
Museums & heritage. London leads by 30 points.30
AlicanteLondon
Score4272
Museums within 10 km14148
Museums within 2 km of centre1149
Share of museums within 2 km %7933
Unesco sites within 50 km24
Nightlife. London leads by 44 points.44
AlicanteLondon
Score5195
Drinking venues within 4 km5915,327
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre4882,443
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %8346
Nightclubs within 4 km54312
Nature & day trips. Alicante and London are level on 40.
AlicanteLondon
Score4040
Protected land share 50 km %716
Landscape blanket share 50 km %014
Land share of disc %5997
Park area within 2 km60 hectares84 hectares
Good for families. London leads by 33 points.33
AlicanteLondon
Score4275
Tourist attractions within 2 km1385
Park area within 2 km60 hectares84 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km13
Sights concentration. London leads by 63 points.63
AlicanteLondon
Score2689
Notable places within 2 km18649
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Alicante leads by 17 points.17
AlicanteLondon
Score7154
Price level global60.884.9
Daily budget€122
Year-round weather. Alicante leads by 24 points.24
AlicanteLondon
Score8763
Monthly daytime high17 °C to 31.1 °C8.2 °C to 23.8 °C
Monthly rainfall3 mm to 52 mm38 mm to 67 mm
Dry months111
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
London
8
9
12
15
18
22
24
23
20
16
11
9
Sea temperature, °C
Alicante
15
14
15
16
18
22
25
26
25
22
19
16
London
No coastline within reach
Rainfall, mm
Alicante
21
18
25
34
21
8
3
12
52
32
34
23
London
59
45
38
43
46
47
46
53
51
64
67
57
Daylight, hours per day
Alicante
10
11
12
13
14
15
15
14
13
11
10
10
London
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
London
2
3
4
6
6
6
7
6
5
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). London: 1991-2020 normals, London Heathrow Airport (22.5 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromAlicanteLondon
PalmaPMI
1 h 0 m
no fares
ALC · 10 km
2 h 10 m
€79-116
LGW · 40 km
BarcelonaBCN
1 h 10 m
€62-93
ALC · 10 km
2 h 0 m
€61-144
LGW · 40 km
ManchesterMAN
2 h 40 m
no fares
ALC · 10 km
55 m
no fares
LHR · 23 km
AmsterdamAMS
2 h 35 m
€150-169
1 stop
ALC · 10 km
1 h 5 m
€146-170
LHR · 23 km
BrusselsBRU, CRL
2 h 25 m
€102-119
1 stop
ALC · 10 km
1 h 5 m
no fares
LHR · 23 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
2 h 5 m
€85-109
ALC · 10 km
1 h 5 m
€92-144
LHR · 23 km
MadridMAD
1 h 5 m
€72-86
ALC · 10 km
2 h 10 m
€124-216
LHR · 23 km
IbizaIBZ
55 m
no fares
ALC · 10 km
2 h 15 m
no fares
LGW · 40 km
MarrakechRAK
1 h 50 m
no fares
ALC · 10 km
3 h 20 m
€128-183
1 stop
LGW · 40 km
MontrealYUL, YHU, YMX
7 h 30 m
no fares
VLC · 127 km
6 h 50 m
no fares
LHR · 23 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

MeasureAlicanteLondon
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 m4 m
Main airportAlicante-Elche Miguel Hernández Airport (ALC)10 km from centre124 non-stop destinationsLondon Heathrow Airport (LHR)23 km from centre220 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year13 days8 days

By the numbers

MeasureAlicanteLondon
City population366,2218,799,728
People per km²1,8195,598
Museums within 10 km8215
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km24
Distinct cuisines in the centre52116
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 London 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.