VacationSelector

Barcelona or Hamburg?

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 year-round weather with your weighting.

Hamburg
53
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.

BarcelonaHamburg
Beaches & swimming. Barcelona leads by 65 points.65
BarcelonaHamburg
Score650
Swim season months30
Beaches 10 km2016
Coast distance2 km22 km
Water distance2 km
Places to eat. Barcelona leads by 17 points.17
BarcelonaHamburg
Score9073
Restaurants within 2 km of centre3,7861,150
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km4138
Museums & heritage. Barcelona leads by 8 points.8
BarcelonaHamburg
Score6860
Museums within 10 km10594
Museums within 2 km of centre4950
Share of museums within 2 km %4753
Unesco sites within 50 km31
Nightlife. Barcelona leads by 14 points.14
BarcelonaHamburg
Score8268
Drinking venues within 4 km2,7111,339
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre1,641834
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %6162
Nightclubs within 4 km245119
Nature & day trips. Barcelona leads by 10 points.10
BarcelonaHamburg
Score5040
Protected land share 50 km %1014
Landscape blanket share 50 km %010
Land share of disc %5199
Park area within 2 km49 hectares89 hectares
Good for families. Barcelona leads by 5 points.5
BarcelonaHamburg
Score6560
Tourist attractions within 2 km6040
Park area within 2 km49 hectares89 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km31
Sights concentration. Barcelona leads by 14 points.14
BarcelonaHamburg
Score7359
Notable places within 2 km258118
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Barcelona leads by 11 points.11
BarcelonaHamburg
Score7160
Price level global60.875.9
Daily budget€122€163
Year-round weather. Barcelona leads by 23 points.23
BarcelonaHamburg
Score7855
Monthly daytime high13.9 °C to 28.9 °C4.3 °C to 23.2 °C
Monthly rainfall27 mm to 83 mm39 mm to 82 mm
Dry months51
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
Hamburg
4
5
9
14
18
21
23
23
19
14
8
5
Sea temperature, °C
Barcelona
14
13
13
14
17
21
24
25
24
21
17
15
Hamburg
No coastline within reach
Rainfall, mm
Barcelona
41
32
40
47
44
27
27
51
83
82
45
36
Hamburg
67
55
57
39
58
74
82
77
65
63
61
72
Daylight, hours per day
Barcelona
10
11
12
13
15
15
15
14
13
11
10
9
Hamburg
8
10
12
14
16
17
17
15
13
11
9
8
Sunshine, hours per day
Barcelona
5
5
7
8
8
9
10
9
7
6
4
4
Hamburg
1
2
4
6
7
7
7
7
5
4
2
1

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. Barcelona: 1991-2020 normals, Barcelona / Aeropuerto (14.4 km from centre). Hamburg: 1991-2020 normals, Hamburg Airport (9.3 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromBarcelonaHamburg
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
2 h 0 m
€37-96
BCN · 13 km
1 h 35 m
€89-225
HAM · 9 km
PalmaPMI
55 m
€40-57
BCN · 13 km
2 h 35 m
no fares
HAM · 9 km
MunichMUC
1 h 55 m
€121-137
BCN · 13 km
1 h 20 m
€195-270
HAM · 9 km
FrankfurtFRA, HHN
1 h 55 m
€62-99
BCN · 13 km
1 h 10 m
no fares
HAM · 9 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
1 h 40 m
€79-101
BCN · 13 km
1 h 30 m
€155-168
1 stop
HAM · 9 km
IstanbulIST, SAW
3 h 15 m
€173-293
BCN · 13 km
3 h 0 m
€178-237
HAM · 9 km
MadridMAD
1 h 15 m
€114-118
BCN · 13 km
2 h 45 m
€193
HAM · 9 km
AmsterdamAMS
2 h 10 m
€132-158
BCN · 13 km
1 h 5 m
€337-378
1 stop
HAM · 9 km
ZurichZRH
1 h 40 m
€116-164
BCN · 13 km
1 h 30 m
€216-237
1 stop
HAM · 9 km
DubaiDXB, DWC
6 h 45 m
€369-388
BCN · 13 km
6 h 25 m
€357-416
HAM · 9 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

MeasureBarcelonaHamburg
Official languageSpanishGerman
CurrencyEuro (EUR)Euro (EUR)
SocketsCF230 V, 50 HzCF230 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideRightRight
Time zoneUTC+1, UTC+2 in summerUTC+1, UTC+2 in summer
Emergency number112112
Elevation9 m6 m
Main airportJosep Tarradellas Barcelona-El Prat Airport (BCN)13 km from centre229 non-stop destinationsHamburg Helmut Schmidt Airport (HAM)9 km from centre119 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year14 days10 days

By the numbers

MeasureBarcelonaHamburg
City population1,731,6491,910,160
People per km²17,0942,530
Museums within 10 km9577
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km31
Distinct cuisines in the centre12883
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 Hamburg 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.