VacationSelector

Bilbao or Cordoba?

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 beaches & swimming and nature & day trips with your weighting.

Cordoba
47
match

Wins on good for families and museums & heritage with your weighting.

What matters to you?

Pick a travel style or drag the sliders. The match scores above update as you do.

The verdict

Choose Bilbao if you want a coast within reach and evenings out: a beach, sea at 22°C in August, and far more places to drink alongside a wider range of kitchens.

Choose Cordoba if you want heat and heritage you can walk to with children: many more attractions near the centre, more UNESCO-listed places within day-trip reach, and summers that stay dry.

Scoreboard

Each measure scored 0 to 100. Open a row for the figures behind the score.

BilbaoCordoba
Beaches & swimming. Bilbao leads by 31 points.31
BilbaoCordoba
Score310
Swim season months10
Beaches 10 km10
Coast distance0 km134 km
Water distance0 km—
Places to eat. Bilbao leads by 15 points.15
BilbaoCordoba
Score6247
Restaurants within 2 km of centre840616
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km2613
Museums & heritage. Cordoba leads by 9 points.9
BilbaoCordoba
Score3847
Museums within 10 km2520
Museums within 2 km of centre1219
Share of museums within 2 km %4895
Unesco sites within 50 km12
Nightlife. Bilbao leads by 15 points.15
BilbaoCordoba
Score5843
Drinking venues within 4 km869444
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre730353
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %8480
Nightclubs within 4 km5014
Nature & day trips. Bilbao leads by 16 points.16
BilbaoCordoba
Score5337
Protected land share 50 km %116
Landscape blanket share 50 km %00
Land share of disc %70100
Park area within 2 km119 hectares108 hectares
Good for families. Cordoba leads by 16 points.16
BilbaoCordoba
Score4763
Tourist attractions within 2 km1759
Park area within 2 km119 hectares108 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km00
Sights concentration. Bilbao leads by 8 points.8
BilbaoCordoba
Score5244
Notable places within 2 km7948
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Bilbao and Cordoba are level on 71.
BilbaoCordoba
Score7171
Price level global60.860.8
Daily budget€122€122
Year-round weather. Cordoba leads by 2 points.2
BilbaoCordoba
Score7072
Monthly daytime high13.5 °C to 26.3 °C15.1 °C to 37.1 °C
Monthly rainfall53 mm to 170 mm1 mm to 91 mm
Dry months04
0255075100

Where they differ

Bilbao has the coast: one beach nearby, and one month when the sea reaches 22°C. Cordoba has neither. More of the land around Bilbao is protected, 11% against 6%, which makes days out of the city easier to fill.

Cordoba suits walking to things with children: it has roughly three times as many tourist attractions near the centre, and more UNESCO-listed places within day-trip reach. Park space near the centre is much the same in both, and neither has a theme park.

Where they are alike

Neither has a hard winter: January highs are 14°C in Bilbao and 15°C in Cordoba, and both stay warm for a long stretch of the year.

Both also keep sightseeing compact. Museums and notable places cluster around the centre in each, and the bars that exist in either sit close in, so a stay in the middle of town covers most of what there is on foot.

Which traveller are you?

Eating and going out: Bilbao. It has more restaurants near the centre and a much wider range of kitchens, about twice as many places to drink and roughly three times as many nightclubs, most of them central.

Families based in the centre: Cordoba. Around three times as many tourist attractions sit within walking distance, and park space matches Bilbao's. Neither has a theme park, so plans rest on the city itself.

Walkers and swimmers: Bilbao. It has the coast, with a beach and August sea at 22°C, and more of the surrounding land protected, which gives days out of the city more to aim at.

What the numbers don't tell you

The value comparison between these two carries no information: it is a national price level, identical for both by construction, and the €122 a day beside it is one national estimate rather than a measurement of either city. Use it to set a budget, not to choose.

Elsewhere the headline figures hide their conditions. Bilbao's coastal edge rests on a short window, one month when the sea reaches 22°C; for the rest of the year swimming is not the point. Cordoba's dry summer comes with highs of 37°C, so its driest months are also its least comfortable, and its rain arrives in autumn and winter.

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
Cordoba
15
17
21
24
28
33
37
37
32
26
19
16
Sea temperature, °C
Bilbao
13
13
13
13
15
18
21
22
20
18
16
14
Cordoba
No coastline within reach
Rainfall, mm
Bilbao
131
108
98
96
76
58
54
53
75
112
170
124
Cordoba
57
53
63
54
43
11
1
7
37
79
79
91
Daylight, hours per day
Bilbao
9
11
12
13
15
15
15
14
13
11
10
9
Cordoba
10
11
12
13
14
15
15
14
13
11
10
10
Sunshine, hours per day
Bilbao
3
3
5
5
6
6
6
6
5
4
3
3
Cordoba
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. Bilbao: 1991-2020 normals, Bilbao / Sondica (4.1 km from centre). Cordoba: 1991-2020 normals, Cordoba / Aeropuerto (7.6 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Bilbao is at its best from July to September, with highs of 25-26°C, its driest stretch of the year and sea at 22°C in August. November is the month to avoid, at 170mm.

Cordoba peaks earlier, in April and May, at 24-28°C with 43-54mm of rain. July and August are dry to the point of 1mm, but highs of 37°C make walking hard work. October is a good second window, warm at 26°C though wetter at 79mm.

Getting there

Flying fromBilbaoCordoba
BarcelonaBCN
1 h 15 m
€58-78
BIO · 5 km
1 h 35 m
€111-178
1 stop
SVQ · 111 km
MadridMAD
1 h 0 m
no fares
BIO · 5 km
1 h 10 m
no fares
SVQ · 111 km
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
1 h 45 m
€62-91
BIO · 5 km
2 h 35 m
no fares
SVQ · 111 km
PalmaPMI
1 h 25 m
no fares
BIO · 5 km
1 h 35 m
no fares
SVQ · 111 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
1 h 35 m
€102
BIO · 5 km
2 h 25 m
€99-133
1 stop
SVQ · 111 km
TenerifeTFS, TFN
3 h 10 m
no fares
BIO · 5 km
2 h 20 m
€126-171
SVQ · 111 km
ValenciaVLC
1 h 15 m
€60-79
BIO · 5 km
1 h 15 m
€50-96
SVQ · 111 km
AmsterdamAMS
2 h 0 m
€196-210
1 stop
BIO · 5 km
2 h 50 m
€180-230
1 stop
SVQ · 111 km
MarrakechRAK
2 h 15 m
no fares
BIO · 5 km
1 h 30 m
no fares
SVQ · 111 km
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
7 h 20 m
no fares
BIO · 5 km
7 h 35 m
no fares
AGP · 137 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

MeasureBilbaoCordoba
Official languageSpanishSpanish
CurrencyEuro (EUR)Euro (EUR)
SocketsCF230 V, 50 HzCF230 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideRightRight
Time zoneUTC+1, UTC+2 in summerUTC+1, UTC+2 in summer
Emergency number112112
Elevation19 m120 m
Main airportBilbao Airport (BIO)5 km from centre70 non-stop destinationsCórdoba Airport (ODB)8 km from centre3 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year13 days12 days

By the numbers

MeasureBilbaoCordoba
City population351,124323,262
People per km²8,440258
Museums within 10 km1716
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km12
Distinct cuisines in the centre5427
Swim season, months above 21 °C1 month–

Where else could you go?

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