VacationSelector

Athens or Cardiff?

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

Your match

Athens
✓ Best match
68
match

Wins on good for families and museums & heritage with your weighting.

Cardiff
48
match

Wins on 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.

AthensCardiff
Beaches & swimming. Athens leads by 2 points.2
AthensCardiff
Score4846
Swim season months50
Beaches 10 km148
Coast distance6 km2 km
Water distance6 km2 km
Places to eat. Athens leads by 9 points.9
AthensCardiff
Score6960
Restaurants within 2 km of centre1,431541
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km2532
Museums & heritage. Athens leads by 34 points.34
AthensCardiff
Score7339
Museums within 10 km12261
Museums within 2 km of centre786
Share of museums within 2 km %6410
Unesco sites within 50 km21
Nightlife. Athens leads by 33 points.33
AthensCardiff
Score8148
Drinking venues within 4 km2,718536
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre1,354395
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %5074
Nightclubs within 4 km13635
Nature & day trips. Cardiff leads by 5 points.5
AthensCardiff
Score4550
Protected land share 50 km %518
Landscape blanket share 50 km %015
Land share of disc %5068
Park area within 2 km128 hectares88 hectares
Good for families. Athens leads by 39 points.39
AthensCardiff
Score7132
Tourist attractions within 2 km684
Park area within 2 km128 hectares88 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km12
Sights concentration. Athens leads by 30 points.30
AthensCardiff
Score7545
Notable places within 2 km29151
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Athens leads by 20 points.20
AthensCardiff
Score7454
Price level global55.884.9
Daily budget€125
Year-round weather. Athens leads by 20 points.20
AthensCardiff
Score7454
Monthly daytime high13.4 °C to 34.5 °C7.7 °C to 20.2 °C
Monthly rainfall6 mm to 86 mm49 mm to 87 mm
Dry months70
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
Athens
13
14
17
21
27
32
34
35
30
24
19
15
Cardiff
8
8
10
13
16
18
20
20
18
14
11
9
Sea temperature, °C
Athens
15
15
15
16
19
22
25
26
25
23
20
17
Cardiff
8
7
8
9
12
15
17
18
17
15
12
9
Rainfall, mm
Athens
59
46
41
31
19
7
7
6
24
39
74
86
Cardiff
77
55
49
54
56
56
61
66
54
87
83
79
Daylight, hours per day
Athens
10
11
12
13
14
15
15
14
13
11
10
10
Cardiff
8
10
12
14
16
17
16
15
13
11
9
8
Sunshine, hours per day
Athens
5
5
7
8
10
12
13
12
9
7
5
4
Cardiff
2
3
4
6
7
7
7
6
5
4
2
2

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. Athens: 1991-2020 normals, Athens / Athenai / Pláka (2.2 km from centre). Cardiff: 1991-2020 normals, Cardiff-Wales Airport (14.9 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromAthensCardiff
ThessalonikiSKG
1 h 0 m
€103-128
ATH · 20 km
3 h 25 m
€95-154
BRS · 34 km
HeraklionHER
1 h 0 m
€84-111
ATH · 20 km
4 h 0 m
no fares
BRS · 34 km
LarnacaLCA
1 h 45 m
€63-80
ATH · 20 km
4 h 40 m
no fares
BRS · 34 km
RhodesRHO
1 h 10 m
€87-123
ATH · 20 km
4 h 10 m
no fares
BRS · 34 km
ThiraJTR
55 m
€94-103
ATH · 20 km
3 h 55 m
no fares
BRS · 34 km
MilanMXP, BGY, LIN
2 h 25 m
€71-91
ATH · 20 km
1 h 55 m
€85-113
1 stop
BRS · 34 km
IstanbulIST, SAW
1 h 20 m
€95-237
ATH · 20 km
3 h 45 m
no fares
BHX · 146 km
MarrakechRAK
4 h 10 m
no fares
ATH · 20 km
3 h 20 m
no fares
BRS · 34 km
TorontoYYZ, YHM, YTZ
10 h 15 m
€634
ATH · 20 km
7 h 10 m
no fares
CWL · 15 km
New DelhiDEL
6 h 30 m
no fares
ATH · 20 km
8 h 40 m
no fares
BHX · 146 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

MeasureAthensCardiff
Official languageGreekEnglish
CurrencyEuro (EUR)Pound Sterling (GBP)
SocketsCF230 V, 50 HzG230 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideRightLeft
Time zoneUTC+2, UTC+3 in summerUTC, UTC+1 in summer
Emergency number112112 or 999
Elevation74 m41 m
Main airportAthens Eleftherios Venizelos International Airport (ATH)20 km from centre171 non-stop destinationsCardiff International Airport (CWL)15 km from centre8 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year15 days8 days

By the numbers

MeasureAthensCardiff
City population643,452383,536
People per km²16,4992,734
Museums within 10 km889
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km21
Distinct cuisines in the centre8255
Swim season, months above 21 °C5 monthsNone

Where else could you go?

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