VacationSelector

Barcelona or Kyoto?

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 nature & day trips with your weighting.

Kyoto
58
match

Wins on museums & heritage and good for families 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.

BarcelonaKyoto
Beaches & swimming. Barcelona leads by 48 points.48
BarcelonaKyoto
Score6517
Swim season months35
Beaches 10 km200
Coast distance2 km47 km
Water distance2 km47 km
Places to eat. Barcelona leads by 6 points.6
BarcelonaKyoto
Score9084
Restaurants within 2 km of centre3,7865,023
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km4122
Museums & heritage. Kyoto leads by 4 points.4
BarcelonaKyoto
Score6872
Museums within 10 km105132
Museums within 2 km of centre4951
Share of museums within 2 km %4739
Unesco sites within 50 km34
Nightlife. Barcelona leads by 2 points.2
BarcelonaKyoto
Score8280
Drinking venues within 4 km2,7113,215
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre1,6412,363
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %6173
Nightclubs within 4 km24526
Nature & day trips. Barcelona leads by 28 points.28
BarcelonaKyoto
Score5022
Protected land share 50 km %102
Landscape blanket share 50 km %02
Land share of disc %51100
Park area within 2 km49 hectares45 hectares
Good for families. Kyoto leads by 1 points.1
BarcelonaKyoto
Score6566
Tourist attractions within 2 km6062
Park area within 2 km49 hectares45 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km34
Sights concentration. Barcelona leads by 21 points.21
BarcelonaKyoto
Score7352
Notable places within 2 km25879
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Barcelona leads by 1 points.1
BarcelonaKyoto
Score7170
Price level global60.862.4
Daily budget€122
Year-round weather. Barcelona leads by 16 points.16
BarcelonaKyoto
Score7862
Monthly daytime high13.9 °C to 28.9 °C8.6 °C to 32.4 °C
Monthly rainfall27 mm to 83 mm40 mm to 232 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
Kyoto
9
9
13
20
24
27
31
32
28
22
17
11
Sea temperature, °C
Barcelona
14
13
13
14
17
21
24
25
24
21
17
15
Kyoto
14
13
13
15
18
21
25
27
26
23
20
17
Rainfall, mm
Barcelona
41
32
40
47
44
27
27
51
83
82
45
36
Kyoto
47
67
112
150
147
232
225
149
215
108
68
40
Daylight, hours per day
Barcelona
10
11
12
13
15
15
15
14
13
11
10
9
Kyoto
10
11
12
13
14
15
14
14
12
11
10
10
Sunshine, hours per day
Barcelona
5
5
7
8
8
9
10
9
7
6
4
4
Kyoto
5
5
6
6
7
5
6
7
5
5
5
5

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. Barcelona: 1991-2020 normals, Barcelona / Aeropuerto (14.4 km from centre). Kyoto: 1971-2000 (sunshine 1991-2020) normals, Kyoto (3.2 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromBarcelonaKyoto
SeoulICN, GMP
11 h 55 m
€459-799
2 stops
BCN · 13 km
1 h 40 m
€107-142
KIX · 81 km
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
2 h 0 m
€37-96
BCN · 13 km
11 h 50 m
no fares
ITM · 39 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
1 h 40 m
€79-101
BCN · 13 km
12 h 0 m
€859-891
3 stops
KIX · 81 km
ShanghaiPVG, SHA
12 h 15 m
no fares
BCN · 13 km
2 h 10 m
€237-303
KIX · 81 km
RomeFCO, CIA
1 h 40 m
€54-89
BCN · 13 km
12 h 5 m
no fares
ITM · 39 km
AmsterdamAMS
2 h 10 m
€132-158
BCN · 13 km
11 h 30 m
no fares
KIX · 81 km
FrankfurtFRA, HHN
1 h 55 m
€62-99
BCN · 13 km
11 h 30 m
€1,507-1966
2 stops
ITM · 39 km
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
7 h 55 m
€562-701
BCN · 13 km
13 h 45 m
no fares
ITM · 39 km
Hong KongHKG
12 h 30 m
no fares
BCN · 13 km
3 h 35 m
€254-314
KIX · 81 km
DohaDOH
6 h 25 m
€282-445
2 stops
BCN · 13 km
10 h 0 m
no fares
KIX · 81 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 2026-09 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

MeasureBarcelonaKyoto
Official languageSpanishJapanese
CurrencyEuro (EUR)Yen (JPY)
SocketsCF230 V, 50 HzAB100 V, 50 and 60 Hz depending on the region
Driving sideRightLeft
Time zoneUTC+1, UTC+2 in summerUTC+9
Emergency number112Police 110, fire 119
Elevation9 m51 m
Main airportJosep Tarradellas Barcelona-El Prat Airport (BCN)13 km from centre229 non-stop destinationsKansai International Airport (KIX)81 km from centre62 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year14 days16 days

By the numbers

MeasureBarcelonaKyoto
City population1,731,6491,463,723
People per km²17,0941,768
Museums within 10 km9576
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km34
Distinct cuisines in the centre12889
Swim season, months above 21 °C3 months5 months

Where else could you go?

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