VacationSelector

Bilbao or Dubai?

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

Your match

Too close to call, 1 point apart

Bilbao
54
match

Wins on nature & day trips and sights concentration with your weighting.

Dubai
55
match

Wins on beaches & swimming and places to eat 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.

BilbaoDubai
Beaches & swimming. Dubai leads by 69 points.69
BilbaoDubai
Score31100
Swim season months112
Beaches 10 km152
Coast distance0 km0 km
Water distance0 km0 km
Places to eat. Dubai leads by 4 points.4
BilbaoDubai
Score6266
Restaurants within 2 km of centre8401,086
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km2626
Museums & heritage. Bilbao and Dubai are level on 38.
BilbaoDubai
Score3838
Museums within 10 km2526
Museums within 2 km of centre1218
Share of museums within 2 km %4869
Unesco sites within 50 km10
Nightlife. Bilbao leads by 5 points.5
BilbaoDubai
Score5853
Drinking venues within 4 km869601
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre730306
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %8451
Nightclubs within 4 km5084
Nature & day trips. Bilbao leads by 35 points.35
BilbaoDubai
Score5318
Protected land share 50 km %114
Landscape blanket share 50 km %00
Land share of disc %7052
Park area within 2 km119 hectares13 hectares
Good for families. Dubai leads by 2 points.2
BilbaoDubai
Score4749
Tourist attractions within 2 km1737
Park area within 2 km119 hectares13 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km04
Sights concentration. Bilbao leads by 15 points.15
BilbaoDubai
Score5237
Notable places within 2 km7933
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Bilbao leads by 2 points.2
BilbaoDubai
Score7169
Price level global60.863.4
Daily budget€122
Year-round weather. Bilbao leads by 4 points.4
BilbaoDubai
Score7066
Monthly daytime high13.5 °C to 26.3 °C24.5 °C to 42.1 °C
Monthly rainfall53 mm to 170 mm0 mm to 21 mm
Dry months012
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
Dubai
25
26
29
34
38
41
42
42
40
36
31
27
Sea temperature, °C
Bilbao
13
13
13
13
15
18
21
22
20
18
16
14
Dubai
23
22
23
25
29
31
33
33
33
31
28
25
Rainfall, mm
Bilbao
131
108
98
96
76
58
54
53
75
112
170
124
Dubai
21
6
11
7
0
0
0
0
0
0
9
18
Daylight, hours per day
Bilbao
9
11
12
13
15
15
15
14
13
11
10
9
Dubai
11
11
12
13
13
14
14
13
12
12
11
11
Sunshine, hours per day
Bilbao
3
3
5
5
6
6
6
6
5
4
3
3
Dubai
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). Dubai: 1991-2020 normals, Dubai International Airport (3.3 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromBilbaoDubai
MadridMAD
1 h 0 m
no fares
BIO · 5 km
7 h 20 m
no fares
DXB · 7 km
BarcelonaBCN
1 h 15 m
€58-78
BIO · 5 km
6 h 45 m
no fares
DXB · 7 km
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
1 h 45 m
€62-91
BIO · 5 km
7 h 10 m
€226-241
DXB · 7 km
AmsterdamAMS
2 h 0 m
€196-210
1 stop
BIO · 5 km
6 h 45 m
€334-439
DXB · 7 km
MunichMUC
2 h 10 m
€203-242
1 stop
BIO · 5 km
6 h 0 m
€306-356
1 stop
DXB · 7 km
MalagaAGP
1 h 35 m
€77-114
BIO · 5 km
7 h 25 m
no fares
AUH · 114 km
IstanbulIST, SAW
3 h 45 m
€192-214
BIO · 5 km
4 h 15 m
€175-294
DXB · 7 km
PalmaPMI
1 h 25 m
no fares
BIO · 5 km
6 h 40 m
no fares
AUH · 114 km
FrankfurtFRA, HHN
2 h 0 m
no fares
BIO · 5 km
6 h 20 m
no fares
DXB · 7 km
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
7 h 20 m
no fares
BIO · 5 km
13 h 35 m
€476-487
DXB · 7 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

MeasureBilbaoDubai
Official languageSpanishArabic
CurrencyEuro (EUR)UAE Dirham (AED)
SocketsCF230 V, 50 HzCG220 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideRightRight
Time zoneUTC+1, UTC+2 in summerUTC+4
Emergency number112112
Elevation19 m0 m
Main airportBilbao Airport (BIO)5 km from centre70 non-stop destinationsDubai International Airport (DXB)7 km from centre292 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year13 days

By the numbers

MeasureBilbaoDubai
City population351,1243,944,751
People per km²8,440
Museums within 10 km1714
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km10
Distinct cuisines in the centre5452
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 Dubai 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.