VacationSelector

Barcelona or Chicago?

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 value for money and museums & heritage with your weighting.

Chicago
56
match

Has no clear advantage with the weighting you have chosen.

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.

BarcelonaChicago
Beaches & swimming. Barcelona leads by 12 points.12
BarcelonaChicago
Score6553
Swim season months31
Beaches 10 km2012
Coast distance2 km10,000 km
Water distance2 km1 km
Places to eat. Barcelona leads by 9 points.9
BarcelonaChicago
Score9081
Restaurants within 2 km of centre3,7862,147
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km4137
Museums & heritage. Barcelona leads by 22 points.22
BarcelonaChicago
Score6846
Museums within 10 km10545
Museums within 2 km of centre4920
Share of museums within 2 km %4744
Unesco sites within 50 km31
Nightlife. Barcelona leads by 20 points.20
BarcelonaChicago
Score8262
Drinking venues within 4 km2,7111,123
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre1,641728
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %6165
Nightclubs within 4 km24551
Nature & day trips. Barcelona leads by 12 points.12
BarcelonaChicago
Score5038
Protected land share 50 km %106
Landscape blanket share 50 km %00
Land share of disc %51100
Park area within 2 km49 hectares118 hectares
Good for families. Barcelona leads by 10 points.10
BarcelonaChicago
Score6555
Tourist attractions within 2 km6018
Park area within 2 km49 hectares118 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km32
Sights concentration. Barcelona leads by 3 points.3
BarcelonaChicago
Score7370
Notable places within 2 km258217
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Barcelona leads by 28 points.28
BarcelonaChicago
Score7143
Price level global60.8100
Daily budget€122
Year-round weather. Barcelona leads by 21 points.21
BarcelonaChicago
Score7857
Monthly daytime high13.9 °C to 28.9 °C0.2 °C to 29.4 °C
Monthly rainfall27 mm to 83 mm54 mm to 121 mm
Dry months50
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
Chicago
0
3
9
15
22
27
29
28
25
17
10
3
Sea temperature, °C
Barcelona
14
13
13
14
17
21
24
25
24
21
17
15
Chicago
3
2
2
4
7
14
21
23
20
15
9
6
Rainfall, mm
Barcelona
41
32
40
47
44
27
27
51
83
82
45
36
Chicago
58
54
68
105
121
115
102
104
85
98
69
59
Daylight, hours per day
Barcelona
10
11
12
13
15
15
15
14
13
11
10
9
Chicago
10
11
12
13
15
15
15
14
13
11
10
9
Sunshine, hours per day
Barcelona
5
5
7
8
8
9
10
9
7
6
4
4
Chicago
No sunshine record

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. Barcelona: 1991-2020 normals, Barcelona / Aeropuerto (14.4 km from centre). Chicago: 1991-2020 normals, Chicago Midway Airport (14.5 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromBarcelonaChicago
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
1 h 40 m
€79-101
BCN · 13 km
8 h 30 m
no fares
ORD · 25 km
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
2 h 0 m
€37-96
BCN · 13 km
8 h 10 m
no fares
ORD · 25 km
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
7 h 55 m
€562-701
BCN · 13 km
2 h 5 m
€201-231
ORD · 25 km
MadridMAD
1 h 15 m
€114-118
BCN · 13 km
8 h 35 m
no fares
ORD · 25 km
RomeFCO, CIA
1 h 40 m
€54-89
BCN · 13 km
9 h 45 m
no fares
ORD · 25 km
MilanMXP, BGY, LIN
1 h 30 m
€33-92
BCN · 13 km
9 h 10 m
no fares
ORD · 25 km
AmsterdamAMS
2 h 10 m
€132-158
BCN · 13 km
8 h 25 m
no fares
ORD · 25 km
Mexico CityMEX, NLU, TLC
11 h 50 m
no fares
BCN · 13 km
3 h 50 m
€253
ORD · 25 km
DohaDOH
6 h 25 m
€282-445
2 stops
BCN · 13 km
14 h 10 m
no fares
ORD · 25 km
SeoulICN, GMP
11 h 55 m
€459-799
2 stops
BCN · 13 km
13 h 5 m
no fares
ORD · 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

MeasureBarcelonaChicago
Official languageSpanish
CurrencyEuro (EUR)US Dollar (USD)
SocketsCF230 V, 50 HzAB120 V, 60 Hz
Driving sideRightRight
Time zoneUTC+1, UTC+2 in summerUTC-6, UTC-5 in summer
Emergency number112911
Elevation9 m179 m
Main airportJosep Tarradellas Barcelona-El Prat Airport (BCN)13 km from centre229 non-stop destinationsChicago O'Hare International Airport (ORD)25 km from centre272 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year14 days13 days

By the numbers

MeasureBarcelonaChicago
City population1,731,6492,746,388
People per km²17,0944,529
Museums within 10 km9543
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km31
Distinct cuisines in the centre12887
Swim season, months above 21 °C3 months1 month

Where else could you go?

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