VacationSelector

Barcelona or Inverness?

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 places to eat and nightlife with your weighting.

Inverness
25
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.

BarcelonaInverness
Beaches & swimming. Barcelona leads by 37 points.37
BarcelonaInverness
Score6528
Swim season months30
Beaches 10 km201
Coast distance2 km1 km
Water distance2 km1 km
Places to eat. Barcelona leads by 69 points.69
BarcelonaInverness
Score9021
Restaurants within 2 km of centre3,786114
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km4111
Museums & heritage. Barcelona leads by 48 points.48
BarcelonaInverness
Score6820
Museums within 10 km1056
Museums within 2 km of centre495
Share of museums within 2 km %4783
Unesco sites within 50 km30
Nightlife. Barcelona leads by 67 points.67
BarcelonaInverness
Score8215
Drinking venues within 4 km2,711113
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre1,64198
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %6187
Nightclubs within 4 km2454
Nature & day trips. Barcelona leads by 41 points.41
BarcelonaInverness
Score509
Protected land share 50 km %1012
Landscape blanket share 50 km %011
Land share of disc %5188
Park area within 2 km49 hectares3 hectares
Good for families. Barcelona leads by 65 points.65
BarcelonaInverness
Score650
Tourist attractions within 2 km603
Park area within 2 km49 hectares3 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km30
Sights concentration. Barcelona leads by 49 points.49
BarcelonaInverness
Score7324
Notable places within 2 km25816
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Barcelona leads by 17 points.17
BarcelonaInverness
Score7154
Price level global60.884.9
Daily budget€122—
Year-round weather. Barcelona leads by 26 points.26
BarcelonaInverness
Score7852
Monthly daytime high13.9 °C to 28.9 °C6.6 °C to 18.9 °C
Monthly rainfall27 mm to 83 mm40 mm to 72 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
Inverness
7
7
9
12
15
17
19
19
16
13
9
7
Sea temperature, °C
Barcelona
14
13
13
14
17
21
24
25
24
21
17
15
Inverness
7
6
6
7
10
12
14
14
13
12
10
8
Rainfall, mm
Barcelona
41
32
40
47
44
27
27
51
83
82
45
36
Inverness
50
44
40
42
51
61
60
67
67
72
57
54
Daylight, hours per day
Barcelona
10
11
12
13
15
15
15
14
13
11
10
9
Inverness
7
9
12
14
17
18
17
15
13
10
8
7
Sunshine, hours per day
Barcelona
5
5
7
8
8
9
10
9
7
6
4
4
Inverness
2
2
4
5
6
5
5
4
4
3
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). Inverness: 1991-2020 normals, Kinloss (43.4 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromBarcelonaInverness
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
2 h 0 m
€37-96
BCN · 13 km
1 h 30 m
€61-96
INV · 12 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
1 h 40 m
€79-101
BCN · 13 km
1 h 50 m
no fares
ABZ · 126 km
PalmaPMI
55 m
€40-57
BCN · 13 km
3 h 5 m
no fares
INV · 12 km
AmsterdamAMS
2 h 10 m
€132-158
BCN · 13 km
1 h 35 m
no fares
INV · 12 km
MalagaAGP
1 h 35 m
€74-142
BCN · 13 km
3 h 20 m
no fares
ABZ · 126 km
DublinDUB
2 h 25 m
€79-116
BCN · 13 km
1 h 15 m
no fares
INV · 12 km
TenerifeTFS, TFN
3 h 20 m
€149-186
1 stop
BCN · 13 km
4 h 40 m
no fares
ABZ · 126 km
AlicanteALC
1 h 10 m
€79-112
BCN · 13 km
3 h 10 m
no fares
ABZ · 126 km
GenevaGVA
1 h 25 m
€70-117
BCN · 13 km
2 h 15 m
no fares
ABZ · 126 km
ManchesterMAN
2 h 15 m
€71-76
BCN · 13 km
1 h 15 m
no fares
INV · 12 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

MeasureBarcelonaInverness
Official languageSpanishEnglish
CurrencyEuro (EUR)Pound Sterling (GBP)
SocketsCF230 V, 50 HzG230 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideRightLeft
Time zoneUTC+1, UTC+2 in summerUTC, UTC+1 in summer
Emergency number112112 or 999
Elevation9 m7 m
Main airportJosep Tarradellas Barcelona-El Prat Airport (BCN)13 km from centre229 non-stop destinationsInverness Airport (INV)12 km from centre13 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year14 days10 days

By the numbers

MeasureBarcelonaInverness
City population1,731,64947,380
People per km²17,0942,289
Museums within 10 km953
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km30
Distinct cuisines in the centre12815
Swim season, months above 21 °C3 monthsNone

Where else could you go?

Every comparison below shares a destination with this one, so you can follow Barcelona or Inverness 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. Ground elevations sampled from the Mapzen terrain tiles via OpenTopoData, merging SRTM, ASTER, NED, EU-DEM and national sources. 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.