VacationSelector

Bath or Bilbao?

Two destinations compared on nine measures of openly sourced data. Weight what matters to you and the verdict follows.

Your match

Bath
40
match

Wins on museums & heritage with your weighting.

Bilbao
✓ Best match
54
match

Wins on beaches & swimming and nightlife 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.

BathBilbao
Beaches & swimming. Bilbao leads by 23 points.23
BathBilbao
Score831
Swim season months01
Beaches 10 km11
Coast distance29 km0 km
Water distance29 km0 km
Places to eat. Bilbao leads by 16 points.16
BathBilbao
Score4662
Restaurants within 2 km of centre245840
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km2626
Museums & heritage. Bath leads by 9 points.9
BathBilbao
Score4738
Museums within 10 km2025
Museums within 2 km of centre1412
Share of museums within 2 km %7048
Unesco sites within 50 km21
Nightlife. Bilbao leads by 22 points.22
BathBilbao
Score3658
Drinking venues within 4 km320869
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre240730
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %7584
Nightclubs within 4 km1150
Nature & day trips. Bilbao leads by 9 points.9
BathBilbao
Score4453
Protected land share 50 km %2811
Landscape blanket share 50 km %270
Land share of disc %9270
Park area within 2 km45 hectares119 hectares
Good for families. Bilbao leads by 7 points.7
BathBilbao
Score4047
Tourist attractions within 2 km1417
Park area within 2 km45 hectares119 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km10
Sights concentration. Bilbao leads by 20 points.20
BathBilbao
Score3252
Notable places within 2 km2579
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Bilbao leads by 17 points.17
BathBilbao
Score5471
Price level global84.960.8
Daily budget€122
Year-round weather. Bilbao leads by 15 points.15
BathBilbao
Score5570
Monthly daytime high6.8 °C to 21.4 °C13.5 °C to 26.3 °C
Monthly rainfall49 mm to 87 mm53 mm to 170 mm
Dry months00
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
Bath
7
8
10
13
16
19
21
21
18
14
10
7
Bilbao
14
14
17
18
21
24
25
26
25
21
17
14
Sea temperature, °C
Bath
8
7
7
9
12
15
18
18
17
15
12
9
Bilbao
13
13
13
13
15
18
21
22
20
18
16
14
Rainfall, mm
Bath
77
55
49
54
56
56
61
66
54
87
83
79
Bilbao
131
108
98
96
76
58
54
53
75
112
170
124
Daylight, hours per day
Bath
8
10
12
14
16
17
16
15
13
11
9
8
Bilbao
9
11
12
13
15
15
15
14
13
11
10
9
Sunshine, hours per day
Bath
2
3
4
6
7
7
7
6
5
4
2
2
Bilbao
3
3
5
5
6
6
6
6
5
4
3
3

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. Bath: 1991-2020 normals, Lyneham (29.2 km from centre). Bilbao: 1991-2020 normals, Bilbao / Sondica (4.1 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromBathBilbao
MadridMAD
2 h 5 m
no fares
BRS · 25 km
1 h 0 m
no fares
BIO · 5 km
BarcelonaBCN
2 h 5 m
no fares
BRS · 25 km
1 h 15 m
€58-78
BIO · 5 km
MalagaAGP
2 h 35 m
no fares
BRS · 25 km
1 h 35 m
€77-114
BIO · 5 km
PalmaPMI
2 h 20 m
no fares
BRS · 25 km
1 h 25 m
no fares
BIO · 5 km
TenerifeTFS, TFN
4 h 0 m
no fares
BRS · 25 km
3 h 10 m
no fares
BIO · 5 km
Las PalmasLPA
4 h 0 m
no fares
BRS · 25 km
3 h 5 m
no fares
BIO · 5 km
AmsterdamAMS
1 h 15 m
no fares
BRS · 25 km
2 h 0 m
€196-210
1 stop
BIO · 5 km
AlicanteALC
2 h 25 m
no fares
BRS · 25 km
1 h 20 m
€81-137
BIO · 5 km
MarrakechRAK
3 h 20 m
no fares
BRS · 25 km
2 h 15 m
no fares
BIO · 5 km
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
7 h 10 m
€518-651
1 stop
LHR · 132 km
7 h 20 m
no fares
BIO · 5 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

MeasureBathBilbao
Official languageEnglishSpanish
CurrencyPound Sterling (GBP)Euro (EUR)
SocketsG230 V, 50 HzCF230 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideLeftRight
Time zoneUTC, UTC+1 in summerUTC+1, UTC+2 in summer
Emergency number112 or 999112
Elevation132 m19 m
Main airportBristol Airport (BRS)25 km from centre116 non-stop destinationsBilbao Airport (BIO)5 km from centre70 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year8 days13 days

By the numbers

MeasureBathBilbao
City population94,092351,124
People per km²3,2458,440
Museums within 10 km1717
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km21
Distinct cuisines in the centre3854
Swim season, months above 21 °CNone1 month

Where else could you go?

Every comparison below shares a destination with this one, so you can follow Bath or Bilbao 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). Public holidays from Nager.Date (MIT). Exchange rates via Frankfurter, based on European Central Bank reference rates. 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. Tourism statistics from Eurostat, © European Union, reused under CC BY 4.0. 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.