VacationSelector

Barcelona or Santiago?

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 sights concentration with your weighting.

Santiago
55
match

Wins on value for money 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.

BarcelonaSantiago
Beaches & swimming. Barcelona leads by 65 points.65
BarcelonaSantiago
Score650
Swim season months30
Beaches 10 km200
Coast distance2 km89 km
Water distance2 km
Places to eat. Barcelona leads by 18 points.18
BarcelonaSantiago
Score9072
Restaurants within 2 km of centre3,7861,317
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km4132
Museums & heritage. Barcelona leads by 23 points.23
BarcelonaSantiago
Score6845
Museums within 10 km10587
Museums within 2 km of centre4930
Share of museums within 2 km %4734
Unesco sites within 50 km30
Nightlife. Barcelona leads by 21 points.21
BarcelonaSantiago
Score8261
Drinking venues within 4 km2,711912
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre1,641542
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %6159
Nightclubs within 4 km245112
Nature & day trips. Santiago leads by 2 points.2
BarcelonaSantiago
Score5052
Protected land share 50 km %1017
Landscape blanket share 50 km %00
Land share of disc %51100
Park area within 2 km49 hectares88 hectares
Good for families. Barcelona leads by 16 points.16
BarcelonaSantiago
Score6549
Tourist attractions within 2 km6012
Park area within 2 km49 hectares88 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km33
Sights concentration. Barcelona leads by 25 points.25
BarcelonaSantiago
Score7348
Notable places within 2 km25862
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Santiago leads by 10 points.10
BarcelonaSantiago
Score7181
Price level global60.846.2
Daily budget€122
Year-round weather. Santiago leads by 7 points.7
BarcelonaSantiago
Score7885
Monthly daytime high13.9 °C to 28.9 °C14.3 °C to 27.7 °C
Monthly rainfall27 mm to 83 mm0 mm to 87 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
Santiago
28
27
26
21
18
15
14
16
19
22
25
27
Sea temperature, °C
Barcelona
14
13
13
14
17
21
24
25
24
21
17
15
Santiago
No coastline within reach
Rainfall, mm
Barcelona
41
32
40
47
44
27
27
51
83
82
45
36
Santiago
0
2
5
16
46
87
52
44
27
11
6
3
Daylight, hours per day
Barcelona
10
11
12
13
15
15
15
14
13
11
10
9
Santiago
14
13
12
11
10
10
10
11
12
13
14
14
Sunshine, hours per day
Barcelona
5
5
7
8
8
9
10
9
7
6
4
4
Santiago
11
9
8
6
5
3
4
5
6
8
9
11

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. Barcelona: 1991-2020 normals, Barcelona / Aeropuerto (14.4 km from centre). Santiago: 1991-2020 normals, Santiago Q. Normal (3.1 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromBarcelonaSantiago
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
2 h 0 m
€37-96
BCN · 13 km
14 h 25 m
no fares
SCL · 14 km
Buenos AiresEZE, AEP
13 h 0 m
€1,610-1626
BCN · 13 km
2 h 0 m
€140-179
SCL · 14 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
1 h 40 m
€79-101
BCN · 13 km
14 h 25 m
no fares
SCL · 14 km
MadridMAD
1 h 15 m
€114-118
BCN · 13 km
13 h 15 m
€799-1378
1 stop
SCL · 14 km
AmsterdamAMS
2 h 10 m
€132-158
BCN · 13 km
14 h 45 m
no fares
SCL · 14 km
Sao PauloGRU, VCP, CGH, RTE
11 h 0 m
no fares
BCN · 13 km
3 h 45 m
€267-313
SCL · 14 km
LimaLIM
12 h 25 m
no fares
BCN · 13 km
3 h 35 m
no fares
SCL · 14 km
BogotaBOG
10 h 40 m
no fares
BCN · 13 km
5 h 40 m
€340-367
1 stop
SCL · 14 km
IstanbulIST, SAW
3 h 15 m
€173-293
BCN · 13 km
16 h 5 m
€960-1123
SCL · 14 km
MiamiMIA, OPF
9 h 35 m
no fares
BCN · 13 km
8 h 30 m
no fares
SCL · 14 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

MeasureBarcelonaSantiago
Official languageSpanishSpanish
CurrencyEuro (EUR)Chilean Peso (CLP)
SocketsCF230 V, 50 HzCL220 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideRightRight
Time zoneUTC+1, UTC+2 in summerUTC-4, UTC-3 in summer
Emergency number112Police 133/134, ambulance 131, fire 132
Elevation9 m575 m
Main airportJosep Tarradellas Barcelona-El Prat Airport (BCN)13 km from centre229 non-stop destinationsComodoro Arturo Merino Benítez International Airport (SCL)14 km from centre68 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year14 days16 days

By the numbers

MeasureBarcelonaSantiago
City population1,731,6496,257,516
People per km²17,0947,468
Museums within 10 km9554
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km30
Distinct cuisines in the centre12864
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 Santiago 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. 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. Exchange rates via Frankfurter, based on European Central Bank reference rates.

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.