VacationSelector

Alicante or Santiago?

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

Your match

Too close to call, 1 point apart

Alicante
56
match

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

Santiago
55
match

Wins on sights concentration and 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.

AlicanteSantiago
Beaches & swimming. Alicante leads by 77 points.77
AlicanteSantiago
Score770
Swim season months50
Beaches 10 km330
Coast distance1 km89 km
Water distance1 km
Places to eat. Santiago leads by 6 points.6
AlicanteSantiago
Score6672
Restaurants within 2 km of centre8671,317
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km3132
Museums & heritage. Santiago leads by 3 points.3
AlicanteSantiago
Score4245
Museums within 10 km1487
Museums within 2 km of centre1130
Share of museums within 2 km %7934
Unesco sites within 50 km20
Nightlife. Santiago leads by 10 points.10
AlicanteSantiago
Score5161
Drinking venues within 4 km591912
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre488542
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %8359
Nightclubs within 4 km54112
Nature & day trips. Santiago leads by 12 points.12
AlicanteSantiago
Score4052
Protected land share 50 km %717
Landscape blanket share 50 km %00
Land share of disc %59100
Park area within 2 km60 hectares88 hectares
Good for families. Santiago leads by 7 points.7
AlicanteSantiago
Score4249
Tourist attractions within 2 km1312
Park area within 2 km60 hectares88 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km13
Sights concentration. Santiago leads by 22 points.22
AlicanteSantiago
Score2648
Notable places within 2 km1862
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Santiago leads by 10 points.10
AlicanteSantiago
Score7181
Price level global60.846.2
Daily budget€122
Year-round weather. Alicante leads by 2 points.2
AlicanteSantiago
Score8785
Monthly daytime high17 °C to 31.1 °C14.3 °C to 27.7 °C
Monthly rainfall3 mm to 52 mm0 mm to 87 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
Santiago
28
27
26
21
18
15
14
16
19
22
25
27
Sea temperature, °C
Alicante
15
14
15
16
18
22
25
26
25
22
19
16
Santiago
No coastline within reach
Rainfall, mm
Alicante
21
18
25
34
21
8
3
12
52
32
34
23
Santiago
0
2
5
16
46
87
52
44
27
11
6
3
Daylight, hours per day
Alicante
10
11
12
13
14
15
15
14
13
11
10
10
Santiago
14
13
12
11
10
10
10
11
12
13
14
14
Sunshine, hours per day
Alicante
6
6
8
8
10
10
11
10
8
7
6
6
Santiago
11
9
8
6
5
3
4
5
6
8
9
11

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. Alicante: 1991-2020 normals, Alicante (2.8 km from centre). Santiago: 1991-2020 normals, Santiago Q. Normal (3.1 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromAlicanteSantiago
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
2 h 25 m
€46-56
ALC · 10 km
14 h 25 m
no fares
SCL · 14 km
BarcelonaBCN
1 h 10 m
€62-93
ALC · 10 km
13 h 45 m
€774-838
2 stops
SCL · 14 km
AmsterdamAMS
2 h 35 m
€150-169
1 stop
ALC · 10 km
14 h 45 m
no fares
SCL · 14 km
MadridMAD
1 h 5 m
€72-86
ALC · 10 km
13 h 15 m
€799-1378
1 stop
SCL · 14 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
2 h 5 m
€85-109
ALC · 10 km
14 h 25 m
no fares
SCL · 14 km
MontrealYUL, YHU, YMX
7 h 30 m
no fares
VLC · 127 km
11 h 0 m
no fares
SCL · 14 km
IstanbulIST, SAW
3 h 35 m
€167-378
VLC · 127 km
16 h 5 m
€960-1123
SCL · 14 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

MeasureAlicanteSantiago
Official languageSpanishSpanish
CurrencyEuro (EUR)Chilean Peso (CLP)
SocketsCF230 V, 50 HzCL220 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideRightRight
Time zoneUTC+1, UTC+2 in summerUTC-4, UTC-3 in summer
Emergency number112Police 133/134, ambulance 131, fire 132
Elevation3 m575 m
Main airportAlicante-Elche Miguel Hernández Airport (ALC)10 km from centre124 non-stop destinationsComodoro Arturo Merino Benítez International Airport (SCL)14 km from centre68 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year13 days16 days

By the numbers

MeasureAlicanteSantiago
City population366,2216,257,516
People per km²1,8197,468
Museums within 10 km854
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km20
Distinct cuisines in the centre5264
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 Santiago 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.