VacationSelector

Alicante or Portland?

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 value for money with your weighting.

Portland
42
match

Wins on sights concentration and places to eat 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.

AlicantePortland
Beaches & swimming. Alicante leads by 77 points.77
AlicantePortland
Score770
Swim season months50
Beaches 10 km3327
Coast distance1 km69 km
Water distance1 km
Places to eat. Portland leads by 8 points.8
AlicantePortland
Score6674
Restaurants within 2 km of centre8671,011
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km3144
Museums & heritage. Alicante leads by 7 points.7
AlicantePortland
Score4235
Museums within 10 km1423
Museums within 2 km of centre1115
Share of museums within 2 km %7965
Unesco sites within 50 km20
Nightlife. Portland leads by 7 points.7
AlicantePortland
Score5158
Drinking venues within 4 km591942
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre488518
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %8355
Nightclubs within 4 km5432
Nature & day trips. Alicante leads by 5 points.5
AlicantePortland
Score4035
Protected land share 50 km %713
Landscape blanket share 50 km %03
Land share of disc %59100
Park area within 2 km60 hectares37 hectares
Good for families. Alicante leads by 8 points.8
AlicantePortland
Score4234
Tourist attractions within 2 km138
Park area within 2 km60 hectares37 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km12
Sights concentration. Portland leads by 9 points.9
AlicantePortland
Score2635
Notable places within 2 km1829
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Alicante leads by 28 points.28
AlicantePortland
Score7143
Price level global60.8100
Daily budget€122
Year-round weather. Alicante leads by 22 points.22
AlicantePortland
Score8765
Monthly daytime high17 °C to 31.1 °C7.9 °C to 27.7 °C
Monthly rainfall3 mm to 52 mm13 mm to 145 mm
Dry months113
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
Portland
8
11
13
16
20
23
27
28
25
18
12
8
Sea temperature, °C
Alicante
15
14
15
16
18
22
25
26
25
22
19
16
Portland
No coastline within reach
Rainfall, mm
Alicante
21
18
25
34
21
8
3
12
52
32
34
23
Portland
128
94
101
75
65
41
13
14
39
87
138
145
Daylight, hours per day
Alicante
10
11
12
13
14
15
15
14
13
11
10
10
Portland
9
10
12
14
15
16
15
14
13
11
10
9
Sunshine, hours per day
Alicante
6
6
8
8
10
10
11
10
8
7
6
6
Portland
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). Portland: 1991-2020 normals, Portland International Airport (9.8 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromAlicantePortland
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
2 h 25 m
€46-56
ALC · 10 km
9 h 55 m
no fares
PDX · 10 km
AmsterdamAMS
2 h 35 m
€150-169
1 stop
ALC · 10 km
10 h 5 m
no fares
PDX · 10 km
FrankfurtFRA, HHN
2 h 15 m
€128-199
1 stop
VLC · 127 km
10 h 30 m
no fares
PDX · 10 km
ReykjavikKEF, RKV
4 h 25 m
no fares
ALC · 10 km
7 h 45 m
no fares
PDX · 10 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

MeasureAlicantePortland
Official languageSpanish
CurrencyEuro (EUR)US Dollar (USD)
SocketsCF230 V, 50 HzAB120 V, 60 Hz
Driving sideRightRight
Time zoneUTC+1, UTC+2 in summerUTC-8, UTC-7 in summer
Emergency number112911
Elevation3 m152 m
Main airportAlicante-Elche Miguel Hernández Airport (ALC)10 km from centre124 non-stop destinationsPortland International Airport (PDX)10 km from centre87 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year13 days12 days

By the numbers

MeasureAlicantePortland
City population366,221652,503
People per km²1,8191,736
Museums within 10 km817
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km20
Distinct cuisines in the centre5282
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 Portland 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.