VacationSelector

Bilbao or Kyoto?

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

Your match

Bilbao
54
match

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

Kyoto
✓ Best match
58
match

Wins on museums & heritage 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.

BilbaoKyoto
Beaches & swimming. Bilbao leads by 14 points.14
BilbaoKyoto
Score3117
Swim season months15
Beaches 10 km10
Coast distance0 km47 km
Water distance0 km47 km
Places to eat. Kyoto leads by 22 points.22
BilbaoKyoto
Score6284
Restaurants within 2 km of centre8405,023
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km2622
Museums & heritage. Kyoto leads by 34 points.34
BilbaoKyoto
Score3872
Museums within 10 km25132
Museums within 2 km of centre1251
Share of museums within 2 km %4839
Unesco sites within 50 km14
Nightlife. Kyoto leads by 22 points.22
BilbaoKyoto
Score5880
Drinking venues within 4 km8693,215
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre7302,363
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %8473
Nightclubs within 4 km5026
Nature & day trips. Bilbao leads by 31 points.31
BilbaoKyoto
Score5322
Protected land share 50 km %112
Landscape blanket share 50 km %02
Land share of disc %70100
Park area within 2 km119 hectares45 hectares
Good for families. Kyoto leads by 19 points.19
BilbaoKyoto
Score4766
Tourist attractions within 2 km1762
Park area within 2 km119 hectares45 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km04
Sights concentration. Bilbao and Kyoto are level on 52.
BilbaoKyoto
Score5252
Notable places within 2 km7979
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Bilbao leads by 1 points.1
BilbaoKyoto
Score7170
Price level global60.862.4
Daily budget€122
Year-round weather. Bilbao leads by 8 points.8
BilbaoKyoto
Score7062
Monthly daytime high13.5 °C to 26.3 °C8.6 °C to 32.4 °C
Monthly rainfall53 mm to 170 mm40 mm to 232 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
Bilbao
14
14
17
18
21
24
25
26
25
21
17
14
Kyoto
9
9
13
20
24
27
31
32
28
22
17
11
Sea temperature, °C
Bilbao
13
13
13
13
15
18
21
22
20
18
16
14
Kyoto
14
13
13
15
18
21
25
27
26
23
20
17
Rainfall, mm
Bilbao
131
108
98
96
76
58
54
53
75
112
170
124
Kyoto
47
67
112
150
147
232
225
149
215
108
68
40
Daylight, hours per day
Bilbao
9
11
12
13
15
15
15
14
13
11
10
9
Kyoto
10
11
12
13
14
15
14
14
12
11
10
10
Sunshine, hours per day
Bilbao
3
3
5
5
6
6
6
6
5
4
3
3
Kyoto
5
5
6
6
7
5
6
7
5
5
5
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). Kyoto: 1971-2000 (sunshine 1991-2020) normals, Kyoto (3.2 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromBilbaoKyoto
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
1 h 45 m
€62-91
BIO · 5 km
11 h 50 m
no fares
ITM · 39 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
1 h 35 m
€102
BIO · 5 km
12 h 0 m
€859-891
3 stops
KIX · 81 km
FrankfurtFRA, HHN
2 h 0 m
no fares
BIO · 5 km
11 h 30 m
€1,507-1966
2 stops
ITM · 39 km
AmsterdamAMS
2 h 0 m
€196-210
1 stop
BIO · 5 km
11 h 30 m
no fares
KIX · 81 km
MunichMUC
2 h 10 m
€203-242
1 stop
BIO · 5 km
11 h 30 m
no fares
KIX · 81 km
DusseldorfDUS, NRN
2 h 0 m
no fares
BIO · 5 km
11 h 30 m
no fares
ITM · 39 km
HamburgHAM, XFW, LBC
2 h 25 m
no fares
BIO · 5 km
11 h 5 m
no fares
ITM · 39 km
IstanbulIST, SAW
3 h 45 m
€192-214
BIO · 5 km
10 h 55 m
no fares
KIX · 81 km
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
7 h 20 m
no fares
BIO · 5 km
13 h 45 m
no fares
ITM · 39 km
RomeFCO, CIA
2 h 10 m
€77-99
BIO · 5 km
12 h 5 m
no fares
ITM · 39 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

MeasureBilbaoKyoto
Official languageSpanishJapanese
CurrencyEuro (EUR)Yen (JPY)
SocketsCF230 V, 50 HzAB100 V, 50 and 60 Hz depending on the region
Driving sideRightLeft
Time zoneUTC+1, UTC+2 in summerUTC+9
Emergency number112Police 110, fire 119
Elevation19 m51 m
Main airportBilbao Airport (BIO)5 km from centre70 non-stop destinationsKansai International Airport (KIX)81 km from centre62 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year13 days16 days

By the numbers

MeasureBilbaoKyoto
City population351,1241,463,723
People per km²8,4401,768
Museums within 10 km1776
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km14
Distinct cuisines in the centre5489
Swim season, months above 21 °C1 month5 months

Where else could you go?

Every comparison below shares a destination with this one, so you can follow Bilbao or Kyoto 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. Ground elevations sampled from the Mapzen terrain tiles via OpenTopoData, merging SRTM, ASTER, NED, EU-DEM and national sources. 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.