VacationSelector

Barcelona or London?

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 value for money with your weighting.

London
64
match

Wins on sights concentration and nightlife 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.

BarcelonaLondon
Beaches & swimming. Barcelona leads by 65 points.65
BarcelonaLondon
Score650
Swim season months30
Beaches 10 km2047
Coast distance2 km43 km
Water distance2 km
Places to eat. Barcelona leads by 2 points.2
BarcelonaLondon
Score9088
Restaurants within 2 km of centre3,7863,317
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km4140
Museums & heritage. London leads by 4 points.4
BarcelonaLondon
Score6872
Museums within 10 km105148
Museums within 2 km of centre4949
Share of museums within 2 km %4733
Unesco sites within 50 km34
Nightlife. London leads by 13 points.13
BarcelonaLondon
Score8295
Drinking venues within 4 km2,7115,327
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre1,6412,443
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %6146
Nightclubs within 4 km245312
Nature & day trips. Barcelona leads by 10 points.10
BarcelonaLondon
Score5040
Protected land share 50 km %1016
Landscape blanket share 50 km %014
Land share of disc %5197
Park area within 2 km49 hectares84 hectares
Good for families. London leads by 10 points.10
BarcelonaLondon
Score6575
Tourist attractions within 2 km6085
Park area within 2 km49 hectares84 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km33
Sights concentration. London leads by 16 points.16
BarcelonaLondon
Score7389
Notable places within 2 km258649
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Barcelona leads by 17 points.17
BarcelonaLondon
Score7154
Price level global60.884.9
Daily budget€122
Year-round weather. Barcelona leads by 15 points.15
BarcelonaLondon
Score7863
Monthly daytime high13.9 °C to 28.9 °C8.2 °C to 23.8 °C
Monthly rainfall27 mm to 83 mm38 mm to 67 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
London
8
9
12
15
18
22
24
23
20
16
11
9
Sea temperature, °C
Barcelona
14
13
13
14
17
21
24
25
24
21
17
15
London
No coastline within reach
Rainfall, mm
Barcelona
41
32
40
47
44
27
27
51
83
82
45
36
London
59
45
38
43
46
47
46
53
51
64
67
57
Daylight, hours per day
Barcelona
10
11
12
13
15
15
15
14
13
11
10
9
London
8
10
12
14
16
17
16
15
13
11
9
8
Sunshine, hours per day
Barcelona
5
5
7
8
8
9
10
9
7
6
4
4
London
2
3
4
6
6
6
7
6
5
4
2
2

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. Barcelona: 1991-2020 normals, Barcelona / Aeropuerto (14.4 km from centre). London: 1991-2020 normals, London Heathrow Airport (22.5 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromBarcelonaLondon
PalmaPMI
55 m
€40-57
BCN · 13 km
2 h 10 m
€79-116
LGW · 40 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
1 h 40 m
€79-101
BCN · 13 km
1 h 5 m
€92-144
LHR · 23 km
MadridMAD
1 h 15 m
€114-118
BCN · 13 km
2 h 10 m
€124-216
LHR · 23 km
MilanMXP, BGY, LIN
1 h 30 m
€33-92
BCN · 13 km
1 h 45 m
€83-138
LGW · 40 km
IbizaIBZ
1 h 0 m
€44-54
BCN · 13 km
2 h 15 m
no fares
LGW · 40 km
MalagaAGP
1 h 35 m
€74-142
BCN · 13 km
2 h 35 m
€119-292
1 stop
LGW · 40 km
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
7 h 55 m
€562-701
BCN · 13 km
7 h 10 m
€518-651
1 stop
LHR · 23 km
MarrakechRAK
2 h 20 m
no fares
BCN · 13 km
3 h 20 m
€128-183
1 stop
LGW · 40 km
ShanghaiPVG, SHA
12 h 15 m
no fares
BCN · 13 km
11 h 30 m
€665-831
1 stop
LHR · 23 km
CancunCUN
10 h 35 m
no fares
BCN · 13 km
10 h 5 m
no fares
LGW · 40 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

MeasureBarcelonaLondon
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 m4 m
Main airportJosep Tarradellas Barcelona-El Prat Airport (BCN)13 km from centre229 non-stop destinationsLondon Heathrow Airport (LHR)23 km from centre220 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year14 days8 days

By the numbers

MeasureBarcelonaLondon
City population1,731,6498,799,728
People per km²17,0945,598
Museums within 10 km95215
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km34
Distinct cuisines in the centre128116
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 London 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.