VacationSelector

Barcelona or Beijing?

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

Your match

Barcelona
✓ Best match
71
match

Wins on beaches & swimming and sights concentration with your weighting.

Beijing
53
match

Wins on good for families and value for money 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.

BarcelonaBeijing
Beaches & swimming. Barcelona leads by 65 points.65
BarcelonaBeijing
Score650
Swim season months30
Beaches 10 km200
Coast distance2 km145 km
Water distance2 km
Places to eatWe cannot measure this for Beijing.
Museums & heritage. Barcelona leads by 5 points.5
BarcelonaBeijing
Score6863
Museums within 10 km10595
Museums within 2 km of centre4915
Share of museums within 2 km %4716
Unesco sites within 50 km36
NightlifeWe cannot measure this for Beijing.
Nature & day trips. Barcelona leads by 15 points.15
BarcelonaBeijing
Score5035
Protected land share 50 km %103
Landscape blanket share 50 km %00
Land share of disc %51100
Park area within 2 km49 hectares143 hectares
Good for families. Beijing leads by 12 points.12
BarcelonaBeijing
Score6577
Tourist attractions within 2 km6041
Park area within 2 km49 hectares143 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km312
Sights concentration. Barcelona leads by 23 points.23
BarcelonaBeijing
Score7350
Notable places within 2 km25869
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Beijing leads by 8 points.8
BarcelonaBeijing
Score7179
Price level global60.849
Daily budget€122
Year-round weather. Barcelona leads by 12 points.12
BarcelonaBeijing
Score7866
Monthly daytime high13.9 °C to 28.9 °C2.2 °C to 31.8 °C
Monthly rainfall27 mm to 83 mm3 mm to 163 mm
Dry months58
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
Barcelona
14
14
16
19
22
26
28
29
26
22
18
15
Beijing
2
6
13
21
27
31
32
31
27
19
10
4
Sea temperature, °C
Barcelona
14
13
13
14
17
21
24
25
24
21
17
15
Beijing
No coastline within reach
Rainfall, mm
Barcelona
41
32
40
47
44
27
27
51
83
82
45
36
Beijing
3
6
9
23
38
74
163
112
56
27
14
3
Daylight, hours per day
Barcelona
10
11
12
13
15
15
15
14
13
11
10
9
Beijing
10
11
12
13
14
15
15
14
13
11
10
9
Sunshine, hours per day
Barcelona
5
5
7
8
8
9
10
9
7
6
4
4
Beijing
6
6
7
8
9
7
6
7
7
7
6
6

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. Barcelona: 1991-2020 normals, Barcelona / Aeropuerto (14.4 km from centre). Beijing: 1991-2020 normals, Beijing (11.1 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromBarcelonaBeijing
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
2 h 0 m
€37-96
BCN · 13 km
10 h 15 m
no fares
PEK · 25 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
1 h 40 m
€79-101
BCN · 13 km
10 h 20 m
no fares
PEK · 25 km
MadridMAD
1 h 15 m
€114-118
BCN · 13 km
11 h 30 m
no fares
PEK · 25 km
ShanghaiPVG, SHA
12 h 15 m
no fares
BCN · 13 km
1 h 55 m
€144-160
PKX · 45 km
SeoulICN, GMP
11 h 55 m
€459-799
2 stops
BCN · 13 km
1 h 45 m
€180-197
PKX · 45 km
RomeFCO, CIA
1 h 40 m
€54-89
BCN · 13 km
10 h 15 m
no fares
PEK · 25 km
MilanMXP, BGY, LIN
1 h 30 m
€33-92
BCN · 13 km
10 h 10 m
no fares
PEK · 25 km
DohaDOH
6 h 25 m
€282-445
2 stops
BCN · 13 km
7 h 55 m
€595-787
3 stops
PKX · 45 km
TorontoYYZ, YHM, YTZ
8 h 15 m
no fares
BCN · 13 km
13 h 5 m
€1,020-1172
2 stops
PEK · 25 km
Sao PauloGRU, VCP, CGH, RTE
11 h 0 m
no fares
BCN · 13 km
21 h 20 m
no fares
PEK · 25 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

MeasureBarcelonaBeijing
Official languageSpanishPutonghua
CurrencyEuro (EUR)Yuan Renminbi (CNY)
SocketsCF230 V, 50 HzACI220 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideRightRight
Time zoneUTC+1, UTC+2 in summerUTC+8
Emergency number112Police 110, ambulance 120, fire 119
Elevation9 m43 m
Main airportJosep Tarradellas Barcelona-El Prat Airport (BCN)13 km from centre229 non-stop destinationsBeijing Capital International Airport (PEK)25 km from centre88 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year14 days6 days

By the numbers

MeasureBarcelonaBeijing
City population1,731,64921,893,095
People per km²17,0941,334
Museums within 10 km9583
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km36
Distinct cuisines in the centre12829
Swim season, months above 21 °C3 months

Where else could you go?

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