VacationSelector

Barcelona or Los Angeles?

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 good for families with your weighting.

Los Angeles
53
match

Wins on nature & day trips and year-round weather 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.

BarcelonaLos Angeles
Beaches & swimming. Barcelona leads by 36 points.36
BarcelonaLos Angeles
Score6529
Swim season months30
Beaches 10 km200
Coast distance2 km
Water distance2 km
Beaches 25 km11
Warmest sea temp20.2 °C
Scoring variantbeachScoreWideRing
Declared2026-08-25
Registerseed/editorial-overrides.json
Places to eat. Barcelona leads by 24 points.24
BarcelonaLos Angeles
Score9066
Restaurants within 2 km of centre3,7861,337
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km4122
Museums & heritage. Barcelona leads by 19 points.19
BarcelonaLos Angeles
Score6849
Museums within 10 km10569
Museums within 2 km of centre4923
Share of museums within 2 km %4733
Unesco sites within 50 km31
Nightlife. Barcelona leads by 28 points.28
BarcelonaLos Angeles
Score8254
Drinking venues within 4 km2,711660
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre1,641432
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %6165
Nightclubs within 4 km24564
Nature & day trips. Los Angeles leads by 12 points.12
BarcelonaLos Angeles
Score5062
Protected land share 50 km %1026
Landscape blanket share 50 km %00
Land share of disc %5180
Park area within 2 km49 hectares20 hectares
Good for families. Barcelona leads by 32 points.32
BarcelonaLos Angeles
Score6533
Tourist attractions within 2 km6011
Park area within 2 km49 hectares20 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km32
Sights concentration. Barcelona leads by 19 points.19
BarcelonaLos Angeles
Score7354
Notable places within 2 km25888
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Barcelona leads by 28 points.28
BarcelonaLos Angeles
Score7143
Price level global60.8100
Daily budget€122
Year-round weather. Los Angeles leads by 9 points.9
BarcelonaLos Angeles
Score7887
Monthly daytime high13.9 °C to 28.9 °C18.6 °C to 24.7 °C
Monthly rainfall27 mm to 83 mm0 mm to 76 mm
Dry months58
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
Los Angeles
19
19
19
20
21
22
24
25
25
24
22
19
Sea temperature, °C
Barcelona
14
13
13
14
17
21
24
25
24
21
17
15
Los Angeles
15
15
15
15
17
18
20
20
20
19
17
16
Rainfall, mm
Barcelona
41
32
40
47
44
27
27
51
83
82
45
36
Los Angeles
73
76
44
16
7
2
1
0
3
13
21
57
Daylight, hours per day
Barcelona
10
11
12
13
15
15
15
14
13
11
10
9
Los Angeles
10
11
12
13
14
14
14
13
12
11
10
10
Sunshine, hours per day
Barcelona
5
5
7
8
8
9
10
9
7
6
4
4
Los Angeles
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). Los Angeles: 1991-2020 normals, Los Angeles Airport (18.5 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromBarcelonaLos Angeles
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
2 h 0 m
€37-96
BCN · 13 km
11 h 0 m
no fares
LAX · 19 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
1 h 40 m
€79-101
BCN · 13 km
11 h 25 m
€600-640
1 stop
LAX · 19 km
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
7 h 55 m
€562-701
BCN · 13 km
5 h 20 m
no fares
LAX · 19 km
MadridMAD
1 h 15 m
€114-118
BCN · 13 km
11 h 40 m
no fares
LAX · 19 km
San FranciscoSFO
11 h 55 m
no fares
BCN · 13 km
1 h 20 m
no fares
LAX · 19 km
RomeFCO, CIA
1 h 40 m
€54-89
BCN · 13 km
12 h 40 m
no fares
LAX · 19 km
AmsterdamAMS
2 h 10 m
€132-158
BCN · 13 km
11 h 10 m
no fares
LAX · 19 km
Mexico CityMEX, NLU, TLC
11 h 50 m
no fares
BCN · 13 km
3 h 35 m
€261-303
1 stop
LAX · 19 km
DubaiDXB, DWC
6 h 45 m
€369-388
BCN · 13 km
16 h 25 m
€964-1015
LAX · 19 km
SeoulICN, GMP
11 h 55 m
€459-799
2 stops
BCN · 13 km
12 h 0 m
€570-646
LAX · 19 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

MeasureBarcelonaLos Angeles
Official languageSpanish
CurrencyEuro (EUR)US Dollar (USD)
SocketsCF230 V, 50 HzAB120 V, 60 Hz
Driving sideRightRight
Time zoneUTC+1, UTC+2 in summerUTC-8, UTC-7 in summer
Emergency number112911
Elevation9 m106 m
Main airportJosep Tarradellas Barcelona-El Prat Airport (BCN)13 km from centre229 non-stop destinationsLos Angeles International Airport (LAX)19 km from centre180 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year14 days13 days

By the numbers

MeasureBarcelonaLos Angeles
City population1,731,6493,898,747
People per km²17,0942,994
Museums within 10 km9538
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km31
Distinct cuisines in the centre12846
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 Los Angeles 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.