VacationSelector

Bilbao or Cancun?

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

Your match

Bilbao
✓ Best match
54
match

Wins on sights concentration and nightlife with your weighting.

Cancun
50
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.

BilbaoCancun
Beaches & swimming. Cancun leads by 66 points.66
BilbaoCancun
Score3197
Swim season months112
Beaches 10 km123
Coast distance0 km3 km
Water distance0 km3 km
Places to eat. Bilbao leads by 8 points.8
BilbaoCancun
Score6254
Restaurants within 2 km of centre840681
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km2618
Museums & heritage. Bilbao leads by 18 points.18
BilbaoCancun
Score3820
Museums within 10 km251
Museums within 2 km of centre121
Share of museums within 2 km %48100
Unesco sites within 50 km10
Nightlife. Bilbao leads by 22 points.22
BilbaoCancun
Score5836
Drinking venues within 4 km869270
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre730175
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %8465
Nightclubs within 4 km5033
Nature & day trips. Cancun leads by 1 points.1
BilbaoCancun
Score5354
Protected land share 50 km %119
Landscape blanket share 50 km %00
Land share of disc %7045
Park area within 2 km119 hectares66 hectares
Good for families. Bilbao leads by 15 points.15
BilbaoCancun
Score4732
Tourist attractions within 2 km172
Park area within 2 km119 hectares66 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km03
Sights concentration. Bilbao leads by 48 points.48
BilbaoCancun
Score524
Notable places within 2 km795
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Cancun leads by 5 points.5
BilbaoCancun
Score7176
Price level global60.854.2
Daily budget€122
Year-round weather. Cancun leads by 11 points.11
BilbaoCancun
Score7081
Monthly daytime high13.5 °C to 26.3 °C26.2 °C to 30.3 °C
Monthly rainfall53 mm to 170 mm38 mm to 224 mm
Dry months01
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
Bilbao
14
14
17
18
21
24
25
26
25
21
17
14
Cancun
26
27
28
29
30
30
30
30
30
29
27
27
Sea temperature, °C
Bilbao
13
13
13
13
15
18
21
22
20
18
16
14
Cancun
27
26
26
27
28
28
29
29
29
29
28
27
Rainfall, mm
Bilbao
131
108
98
96
76
58
54
53
75
112
170
124
Cancun
63
50
38
41
92
181
89
114
166
224
124
68
Daylight, hours per day
Bilbao
9
11
12
13
15
15
15
14
13
11
10
9
Cancun
11
11
12
13
13
13
13
13
12
12
11
11
Sunshine, hours per day
Bilbao
3
3
5
5
6
6
6
6
5
4
3
3
Cancun
No sunshine record

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. Bilbao: 1991-2020 normals, Bilbao / Sondica (4.1 km from centre). Cancun: 2001-2020 normals, NASA POWER reanalysis grid, no weather station within 90 km.

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromBilbaoCancun
MadridMAD
1 h 0 m
no fares
BIO · 5 km
10 h 0 m
€721-977
CUN · 14 km
BarcelonaBCN
1 h 15 m
€58-78
BIO · 5 km
10 h 35 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
1 h 45 m
€62-91
BIO · 5 km
10 h 0 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
AmsterdamAMS
2 h 0 m
€196-210
1 stop
BIO · 5 km
10 h 25 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
FrankfurtFRA, HHN
2 h 0 m
no fares
BIO · 5 km
10 h 45 m
€657-706
1 stop
CUN · 14 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
1 h 35 m
€102
BIO · 5 km
10 h 20 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
7 h 20 m
no fares
BIO · 5 km
3 h 35 m
€328-337
CUN · 14 km
LisbonLIS
1 h 30 m
€129-223
1 stop
BIO · 5 km
9 h 30 m
€740-984
1 stop
CUN · 14 km
DublinDUB
2 h 0 m
no fares
BIO · 5 km
9 h 30 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
IstanbulIST, SAW
3 h 45 m
€192-214
BIO · 5 km
12 h 55 m
no fares
CUN · 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

MeasureBilbaoCancun
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-5
Emergency number112911
Elevation19 m5 m
Main airportBilbao Airport (BIO)5 km from centre70 non-stop destinationsCancún International Airport (CUN)14 km from centre136 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year13 days9 days

By the numbers

MeasureBilbaoCancun
City population351,124888,797
People per km²8,440
Museums within 10 km171
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km10
Distinct cuisines in the centre5431
Swim season, months above 21 °C1 month12 months

Where else could you go?

Every comparison below shares a destination with this one, so you can follow Bilbao or Cancun 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. Temperature and rainfall for destinations with no weather station are from the NASA POWER 2001-2020 climatology, derived from MERRA-2. 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.