VacationSelector

Barcelona or Manchester?

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.

Manchester
47
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.

BarcelonaManchester
Beaches & swimming. Barcelona leads by 37 points.37
BarcelonaManchester
Score6528
Swim season months30
Beaches 10 km2010
Coast distance2 km27 km
Water distance2 km27 km
Places to eat. Barcelona leads by 22 points.22
BarcelonaManchester
Score9068
Restaurants within 2 km of centre3,786853
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km4135
Museums & heritage. Barcelona leads by 26 points.26
BarcelonaManchester
Score6842
Museums within 10 km10523
Museums within 2 km of centre4911
Share of museums within 2 km %4748
Unesco sites within 50 km32
Nightlife. Barcelona leads by 20 points.20
BarcelonaManchester
Score8262
Drinking venues within 4 km2,7111,029
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre1,641792
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %6177
Nightclubs within 4 km24582
Nature & day trips. Barcelona leads by 14 points.14
BarcelonaManchester
Score5036
Protected land share 50 km %1017
Landscape blanket share 50 km %017
Land share of disc %5199
Park area within 2 km49 hectares63 hectares
Good for families. Barcelona leads by 33 points.33
BarcelonaManchester
Score6532
Tourist attractions within 2 km605
Park area within 2 km49 hectares63 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km32
Sights concentration. Barcelona leads by 25 points.25
BarcelonaManchester
Score7348
Notable places within 2 km25861
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Barcelona leads by 17 points.17
BarcelonaManchester
Score7154
Price level global60.884.9
Daily budget€122
Year-round weather. Barcelona leads by 24 points.24
BarcelonaManchester
Score7854
Monthly daytime high13.9 °C to 28.9 °C7.2 °C to 20.8 °C
Monthly rainfall27 mm to 83 mm51 mm to 95 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
Manchester
7
8
10
13
17
19
21
20
18
14
10
8
Sea temperature, °C
Barcelona
14
13
13
14
17
21
24
25
24
21
17
15
Manchester
7
6
7
9
11
14
16
17
16
14
11
9
Rainfall, mm
Barcelona
41
32
40
47
44
27
27
51
83
82
45
36
Manchester
67
62
51
61
59
63
60
73
71
95
86
84
Daylight, hours per day
Barcelona
10
11
12
13
15
15
15
14
13
11
10
9
Manchester
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
Manchester
2
2
3
5
6
6
6
6
4
3
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). Manchester: 1991-2020 normals, Manchester Airport (14.8 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromBarcelonaManchester
PalmaPMI
55 m
€40-57
BCN · 13 km
2 h 30 m
no fares
MAN · 15 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
1 h 40 m
€79-101
BCN · 13 km
1 h 20 m
no fares
MAN · 15 km
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
2 h 0 m
€37-96
BCN · 13 km
55 m
no fares
MAN · 15 km
MadridMAD
1 h 15 m
€114-118
BCN · 13 km
2 h 20 m
no fares
MAN · 15 km
MilanMXP, BGY, LIN
1 h 30 m
€33-92
BCN · 13 km
2 h 0 m
no fares
MAN · 15 km
RomeFCO, CIA
1 h 40 m
€54-89
BCN · 13 km
2 h 40 m
no fares
MAN · 15 km
IbizaIBZ
1 h 0 m
€44-54
BCN · 13 km
2 h 35 m
no fares
MAN · 15 km
MarrakechRAK
2 h 20 m
no fares
BCN · 13 km
3 h 35 m
no fares
MAN · 15 km
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
7 h 55 m
€562-701
BCN · 13 km
7 h 0 m
no fares
MAN · 15 km
BeijingPEK, PKX
11 h 0 m
no fares
BCN · 13 km
10 h 10 m
no fares
MAN · 15 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

MeasureBarcelonaManchester
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 m38 m
Main airportJosep Tarradellas Barcelona-El Prat Airport (BCN)13 km from centre229 non-stop destinationsManchester Airport (MAN)15 km from centre210 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year14 days8 days

By the numbers

MeasureBarcelonaManchester
City population1,731,649547,627
People per km²17,0944,737
Museums within 10 km9528
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km32
Distinct cuisines in the centre12863
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 Manchester 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.