VacationSelector

Barcelona or Mexico City?

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 places to eat with your weighting.

Mexico City
62
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.

BarcelonaMexico City
Beaches & swimming. Barcelona leads by 65 points.65
BarcelonaMexico City
Score650
Swim season months30
Beaches 10 km204
Coast distance2 km247 km
Water distance2 km
Places to eat. Barcelona leads by 24 points.24
BarcelonaMexico City
Score9066
Restaurants within 2 km of centre3,7862,179
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km4115
Museums & heritage. Mexico City leads by 11 points.11
BarcelonaMexico City
Score6879
Museums within 10 km105138
Museums within 2 km of centre4965
Share of museums within 2 km %4747
Unesco sites within 50 km36
Nightlife. Barcelona leads by 4 points.4
BarcelonaMexico City
Score8278
Drinking venues within 4 km2,7112,156
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre1,641926
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %6143
Nightclubs within 4 km245198
Nature & day trips. Mexico City leads by 13 points.13
BarcelonaMexico City
Score5063
Protected land share 50 km %1030
Landscape blanket share 50 km %00
Land share of disc %51100
Park area within 2 km49 hectares32 hectares
Good for families. Barcelona leads by 15 points.15
BarcelonaMexico City
Score6550
Tourist attractions within 2 km6023
Park area within 2 km49 hectares32 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km34
Sights concentration. Barcelona leads by 19 points.19
BarcelonaMexico City
Score7354
Notable places within 2 km25888
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Mexico City leads by 5 points.5
BarcelonaMexico City
Score7176
Price level global60.854.2
Daily budget€122
Year-round weather. Mexico City leads by 12 points.12
BarcelonaMexico City
Score7890
Monthly daytime high13.9 °C to 28.9 °C22.2 °C to 27.9 °C
Monthly rainfall27 mm to 83 mm3 mm to 186 mm
Dry months56
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
Mexico City
22
25
26
28
27
26
25
25
24
23
23
22
Sea temperature, °C
Barcelona
14
13
13
14
17
21
24
25
24
21
17
15
Mexico City
No coastline within reach
Rainfall, mm
Barcelona
41
32
40
47
44
27
27
51
83
82
45
36
Mexico City
7
3
19
27
53
127
176
186
144
79
10
9
Daylight, hours per day
Barcelona
10
11
12
13
15
15
15
14
13
11
10
9
Mexico City
11
12
12
13
13
13
13
13
12
12
11
11
Sunshine, hours per day
Barcelona
5
5
7
8
8
9
10
9
7
6
4
4
Mexico City
8
8
9
8
8
6
6
6
5
6
7
7

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. Barcelona: 1991-2020 normals, Barcelona / Aeropuerto (14.4 km from centre). Mexico City: 1991-2020 normals, Mexico Central, D. F. (7.9 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromBarcelonaMexico City
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
2 h 0 m
€37-96
BCN · 13 km
11 h 10 m
no fares
MEX · 7 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
1 h 40 m
€79-101
BCN · 13 km
11 h 30 m
no fares
MEX · 7 km
MadridMAD
1 h 15 m
€114-118
BCN · 13 km
11 h 20 m
no fares
MEX · 7 km
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
7 h 55 m
€562-701
BCN · 13 km
4 h 40 m
€335-379
MEX · 7 km
RomeFCO, CIA
1 h 40 m
€54-89
BCN · 13 km
12 h 40 m
no fares
MEX · 7 km
CancunCUN
10 h 35 m
no fares
BCN · 13 km
2 h 10 m
€123-162
MEX · 7 km
AmsterdamAMS
2 h 10 m
€132-158
BCN · 13 km
11 h 30 m
no fares
MEX · 7 km
Los AngelesLAX, BUR, SNA, VNY
12 h 5 m
no fares
BCN · 13 km
3 h 35 m
€248-282
1 stop
MEX · 7 km
DubaiDXB, DWC
6 h 45 m
€369-388
BCN · 13 km
17 h 30 m
€1,075-1211
2 stops
MEX · 7 km
SeoulICN, GMP
11 h 55 m
€459-799
2 stops
BCN · 13 km
14 h 55 m
no fares
MEX · 7 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

MeasureBarcelonaMexico City
Official languageSpanishSpanish, Nahuatl, Yucatec Maya
CurrencyEuro (EUR)Mexican Peso (MXN)
SocketsCF230 V, 50 HzAB127 V, 60 Hz
Driving sideRightRight
Time zoneUTC+1, UTC+2 in summerUTC-6
Emergency number112911
Elevation9 m2,240 m
Main airportJosep Tarradellas Barcelona-El Prat Airport (BCN)13 km from centre229 non-stop destinationsMexico City Benito Juárez International Airport (MEX)7 km from centre95 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year14 days9 days

By the numbers

MeasureBarcelonaMexico City
City population1,731,6499,209,944
People per km²17,0946,202
Museums within 10 km95108
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km36
Distinct cuisines in the centre12850
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 Mexico City 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.