VacationSelector

Alicante or Paphos?

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 places to eat and nightlife with your weighting.

Paphos
46
match

Wins on beaches & swimming 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.

AlicantePaphos
Beaches & swimming. Paphos leads by 2 points.2
AlicantePaphos
Score7779
Swim season months56
Beaches 10 km3327
Coast distance1 km1 km
Water distance1 km1 km
Places to eat. Alicante leads by 22 points.22
AlicantePaphos
Score6644
Restaurants within 2 km of centre867251
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km3122
Museums & heritage. Alicante leads by 20 points.20
AlicantePaphos
Score4222
Museums within 10 km148
Museums within 2 km of centre113
Share of museums within 2 km %7938
Unesco sites within 50 km22
Nightlife. Alicante leads by 21 points.21
AlicantePaphos
Score5130
Drinking venues within 4 km591224
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre488161
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %8372
Nightclubs within 4 km5411
Nature & day trips. Alicante leads by 17 points.17
AlicantePaphos
Score4023
Protected land share 50 km %72
Landscape blanket share 50 km %00
Land share of disc %5933
Park area within 2 km60 hectares27 hectares
Good for families. Alicante and Paphos are level on 42.
AlicantePaphos
Score4242
Tourist attractions within 2 km1330
Park area within 2 km60 hectares27 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km10
Sights concentration. Alicante leads by 7 points.7
AlicantePaphos
Score2619
Notable places within 2 km1812
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Alicante leads by 1 points.1
AlicantePaphos
Score7170
Price level global60.861.4
Daily budget€122€129
Year-round weather. Alicante leads by 1 points.1
AlicantePaphos
Score8786
Monthly daytime high17 °C to 31.1 °C17 °C to 30.8 °C
Monthly rainfall3 mm to 52 mm0 mm to 98 mm
Dry months118
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
Paphos
17
17
19
21
25
28
30
31
29
27
23
19
Sea temperature, °C
Alicante
15
14
15
16
18
22
25
26
25
22
19
16
Paphos
17
17
17
18
21
24
27
28
27
25
22
19
Rainfall, mm
Alicante
21
18
25
34
21
8
3
12
52
32
34
23
Paphos
81
47
29
17
10
2
1
0
5
14
42
98
Daylight, hours per day
Alicante
10
11
12
13
14
15
15
14
13
11
10
10
Paphos
10
11
12
13
14
14
14
14
12
11
10
10
Sunshine, hours per day
Alicante
6
6
8
8
10
10
11
10
8
7
6
6
Paphos
No sunshine record

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. Alicante: 1991-2020 normals, Alicante (2.8 km from centre). Paphos: 1991-2020 normals, Paphos Airport (8.4 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromAlicantePaphos
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
2 h 25 m
€46-56
ALC · 10 km
4 h 25 m
€125-167
PFO · 8 km
ManchesterMAN
2 h 40 m
no fares
ALC · 10 km
4 h 40 m
no fares
PFO · 8 km
BrusselsBRU, CRL
2 h 25 m
€102-119
1 stop
ALC · 10 km
4 h 5 m
€176-392
2 stops
PFO · 8 km
BristolBRS
2 h 25 m
€66-103
ALC · 10 km
4 h 35 m
no fares
PFO · 8 km
BirminghamBHX
2 h 30 m
€69-172
ALC · 10 km
4 h 35 m
no fares
PFO · 8 km
AmsterdamAMS
2 h 35 m
€150-169
1 stop
ALC · 10 km
4 h 5 m
€253-340
1 stop
PFO · 8 km
NewcastleNCL
2 h 50 m
no fares
ALC · 10 km
4 h 45 m
no fares
PFO · 8 km
NottinghamEMA
2 h 35 m
no fares
ALC · 10 km
4 h 35 m
no fares
PFO · 8 km
WarsawWAW, WMI
3 h 20 m
€88-91
ALC · 10 km
3 h 10 m
€123-135
PFO · 8 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
2 h 5 m
€85-109
ALC · 10 km
4 h 5 m
€197-331
1 stop
PFO · 8 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

MeasureAlicantePaphos
Official languageSpanishTurkish, Greek, Modern Greek
CurrencyEuro (EUR)Euro (EUR)
SocketsCF230 V, 50 HzG240 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideRightLeft
Time zoneUTC+1, UTC+2 in summerUTC+2, UTC+3 in summer
Emergency number112112
Elevation3 m72 m
Main airportAlicante-Elche Miguel Hernández Airport (ALC)10 km from centre124 non-stop destinationsPaphos International Airport (PFO)8 km from centre57 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year13 days17 days

By the numbers

MeasureAlicantePaphos
City population366,22135,961
People per km²1,8191,987
Museums within 10 km84
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km22
Distinct cuisines in the centre5236
Swim season, months above 21 °C5 months6 months

Where else could you go?

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