VacationSelector

Beijing or Malaga?

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

Your match

Beijing
53
match

Wins on good for families and sights concentration with your weighting.

Malaga
✓ Best match
59
match

Wins on beaches & swimming 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.

BeijingMalaga
Beaches & swimming. Malaga leads by 66 points.66
BeijingMalaga
Score066
Swim season months03
Beaches 10 km021
Coast distance145 km0 km
Water distance0 km
Places to eatWe cannot measure this for Beijing.
Museums & heritage. Beijing leads by 10 points.10
BeijingMalaga
Score6353
Museums within 10 km9540
Museums within 2 km of centre1535
Share of museums within 2 km %1688
Unesco sites within 50 km61
NightlifeWe cannot measure this for Beijing.
Nature & day trips. Malaga leads by 8 points.8
BeijingMalaga
Score3543
Protected land share 50 km %37
Landscape blanket share 50 km %00
Land share of disc %10063
Park area within 2 km143 hectares85 hectares
Good for families. Beijing leads by 24 points.24
BeijingMalaga
Score7753
Tourist attractions within 2 km4133
Park area within 2 km143 hectares85 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km120
Sights concentration. Beijing leads by 13 points.13
BeijingMalaga
Score5037
Notable places within 2 km6933
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Beijing leads by 8 points.8
BeijingMalaga
Score7971
Price level global4960.8
Daily budget€122
Year-round weather. Malaga leads by 16 points.16
BeijingMalaga
Score6682
Monthly daytime high2.2 °C to 31.8 °C17.2 °C to 31.5 °C
Monthly rainfall3 mm to 163 mm0 mm to 88 mm
Dry months85
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
Beijing
2
6
13
21
27
31
32
31
27
19
10
4
Malaga
17
18
20
22
25
29
31
32
28
24
20
18
Sea temperature, °C
Beijing
No coastline within reach
Malaga
15
15
15
16
18
20
22
23
22
20
17
16
Rainfall, mm
Beijing
3
6
9
23
38
74
163
112
56
27
14
3
Malaga
62
55
66
41
23
4
0
3
25
60
78
88
Daylight, hours per day
Beijing
10
11
12
13
14
15
15
14
13
11
10
9
Malaga
10
11
12
13
14
15
14
14
13
11
10
10
Sunshine, hours per day
Beijing
6
6
7
8
9
7
6
7
7
7
6
6
Malaga
6
6
7
8
10
11
12
11
8
7
6
5

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. Beijing: 1991-2020 normals, Beijing (11.1 km from centre). Malaga: 1991-2020 normals, Malaga / Aeropuerto (8.2 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromBeijingMalaga
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
10 h 15 m
no fares
PEK · 25 km
2 h 40 m
€67-129
AGP · 9 km
BarcelonaBCN
11 h 0 m
no fares
PEK · 25 km
1 h 35 m
€73-109
AGP · 9 km
AmsterdamAMS
9 h 55 m
no fares
PEK · 25 km
2 h 55 m
€146-177
AGP · 9 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
10 h 20 m
no fares
PEK · 25 km
2 h 25 m
€92
AGP · 9 km
DublinDUB
10 h 25 m
no fares
PEK · 25 km
2 h 50 m
€122-139
1 stop
AGP · 9 km
BrusselsBRU, CRL
10 h 0 m
no fares
PEK · 25 km
2 h 45 m
€110-142
1 stop
AGP · 9 km
MadridMAD
11 h 30 m
no fares
PEK · 25 km
1 h 10 m
no fares
AGP · 9 km
CopenhagenCPH
9 h 10 m
no fares
PEK · 25 km
3 h 35 m
€107-122
AGP · 9 km
StockholmARN, BMA, NYO, VST
8 h 30 m
no fares
PEK · 25 km
4 h 15 m
€112-120
AGP · 9 km
DohaDOH
7 h 55 m
€595-787
3 stops
PKX · 45 km
7 h 5 m
no fares
AGP · 9 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 2026-09 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

MeasureBeijingMalaga
Official languagePutonghuaSpanish
CurrencyYuan Renminbi (CNY)Euro (EUR)
SocketsACI220 V, 50 HzCF230 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideRightRight
Time zoneUTC+8UTC+1, UTC+2 in summer
Emergency numberPolice 110, ambulance 120, fire 119112
Elevation43 m18 m
Main airportBeijing Capital International Airport (PEK)25 km from centre88 non-stop destinationsMálaga-Costa del Sol Airport (AGP)9 km from centre165 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year6 days12 days

By the numbers

MeasureBeijingMalaga
City population21,893,095599,063
People per km²1,3341,517
Museums within 10 km8332
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km61
Distinct cuisines in the centre2965
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 Beijing or Malaga 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. 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. Sea surface temperature from NOAA OISST v2.1, NOAA Physical Sciences Laboratory. 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.