VacationSelector

Barcelona or Seoul?

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 nature & day trips with your weighting.

Seoul
63
match

Wins on museums & heritage and good for families 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.

BarcelonaSeoul
Beaches & swimming. Barcelona leads by 50 points.50
BarcelonaSeoul
Score6515
Swim season months32
Beaches 10 km201
Coast distance2 km28 km
Water distance2 km28 km
Places to eat. Barcelona leads by 5 points.5
BarcelonaSeoul
Score9085
Restaurants within 2 km of centre3,7863,559
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km4132
Museums & heritage. Seoul leads by 15 points.15
BarcelonaSeoul
Score6883
Museums within 10 km105203
Museums within 2 km of centre4990
Share of museums within 2 km %4744
Unesco sites within 50 km35
Nightlife. Barcelona leads by 2 points.2
BarcelonaSeoul
Score8280
Drinking venues within 4 km2,7113,291
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre1,6411,630
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %6150
Nightclubs within 4 km24529
Nature & day trips. Barcelona leads by 18 points.18
BarcelonaSeoul
Score5032
Protected land share 50 km %101
Landscape blanket share 50 km %00
Land share of disc %5195
Park area within 2 km49 hectares126 hectares
Good for families. Seoul leads by 14 points.14
BarcelonaSeoul
Score6579
Tourist attractions within 2 km6062
Park area within 2 km49 hectares126 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km38
Sights concentration. Barcelona leads by 14 points.14
BarcelonaSeoul
Score7359
Notable places within 2 km258118
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Seoul leads by 1 points.1
BarcelonaSeoul
Score7172
Price level global60.859.4
Daily budget€122
Year-round weather. Barcelona leads by 17 points.17
BarcelonaSeoul
Score7861
Monthly daytime high13.9 °C to 28.9 °C2 °C to 30 °C
Monthly rainfall27 mm to 83 mm18 mm to 422 mm
Dry months54
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
Seoul
2
5
11
18
24
28
29
30
26
20
12
4
Sea temperature, °C
Barcelona
14
13
13
14
17
21
24
25
24
21
17
15
Seoul
6
4
5
8
12
17
21
24
23
20
15
10
Rainfall, mm
Barcelona
41
32
40
47
44
27
27
51
83
82
45
36
Seoul
18
28
38
70
104
138
422
390
156
49
50
20
Daylight, hours per day
Barcelona
10
11
12
13
15
15
15
14
13
11
10
9
Seoul
10
11
12
13
14
15
15
14
13
11
10
10
Sunshine, hours per day
Barcelona
5
5
7
8
8
9
10
9
7
6
4
4
Seoul
5
5
6
7
7
6
4
5
6
7
5
5

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. Barcelona: 1991-2020 normals, Barcelona / Aeropuerto (14.4 km from centre). Seoul: 1991-2020 normals, Seoul (2.2 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromBarcelonaSeoul
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
2 h 0 m
€37-96
BCN · 13 km
11 h 5 m
€603-659
1 stop
ICN · 49 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
1 h 40 m
€79-101
BCN · 13 km
11 h 10 m
€687-728
2 stops
ICN · 49 km
RomeFCO, CIA
1 h 40 m
€54-89
BCN · 13 km
11 h 15 m
€632-735
2 stops
ICN · 49 km
MadridMAD
1 h 15 m
€114-118
BCN · 13 km
12 h 25 m
no fares
ICN · 49 km
MilanMXP, BGY, LIN
1 h 30 m
€33-92
BCN · 13 km
11 h 5 m
no fares
ICN · 49 km
Hong KongHKG
12 h 30 m
no fares
BCN · 13 km
3 h 5 m
€172-189
ICN · 49 km
AmsterdamAMS
2 h 10 m
€132-158
BCN · 13 km
10 h 45 m
no fares
ICN · 49 km
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
7 h 55 m
€562-701
BCN · 13 km
13 h 45 m
€770-823
ICN · 49 km
DohaDOH
6 h 25 m
€282-445
2 stops
BCN · 13 km
9 h 0 m
no fares
ICN · 49 km
Mexico CityMEX, NLU, TLC
11 h 50 m
no fares
BCN · 13 km
14 h 55 m
€1,052-1072
2 stops
ICN · 49 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

MeasureBarcelonaSeoul
Official languageSpanishKorean, Korean Sign Language
CurrencyEuro (EUR)Won (KRW)
SocketsCF230 V, 50 HzCF220 V, 60 Hz
Driving sideRightRight
Time zoneUTC+1, UTC+2 in summerUTC+9
Emergency number112Police 112, ambulance 119, fire 119
Elevation9 m38 m
Main airportJosep Tarradellas Barcelona-El Prat Airport (BCN)13 km from centre229 non-stop destinationsIncheon International Airport (ICN)49 km from centre161 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year14 days18 days

By the numbers

MeasureBarcelonaSeoul
City population1,731,6499,668,465
People per km²17,09415,973
Museums within 10 km9580
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km35
Distinct cuisines in the centre128156
Swim season, months above 21 °C3 months2 months

Where else could you go?

Every comparison below shares a destination with this one, so you can follow Barcelona or Seoul 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.