VacationSelector

Bilbao or Lyon?

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, 2 points apart

Bilbao
54
match

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

Lyon
52
match

Wins on places to eat 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.

Scoreboard

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

BilbaoLyon
Beaches & swimming. Bilbao leads by 31 points.31
BilbaoLyon
Score310
Swim season months10
Beaches 10 km126
Coast distance0 km253 km
Water distance0 km
Places to eat. Lyon leads by 17 points.17
BilbaoLyon
Score6279
Restaurants within 2 km of centre8401,691
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km2640
Museums & heritage. Lyon leads by 17 points.17
BilbaoLyon
Score3855
Museums within 10 km2553
Museums within 2 km of centre1225
Share of museums within 2 km %4847
Unesco sites within 50 km12
Nightlife. Bilbao and Lyon are level on 58.
BilbaoLyon
Score5858
Drinking venues within 4 km869866
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre730611
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %8471
Nightclubs within 4 km5047
Nature & day trips. Bilbao leads by 20 points.20
BilbaoLyon
Score5333
Protected land share 50 km %116
Landscape blanket share 50 km %06
Land share of disc %70100
Park area within 2 km119 hectares120 hectares
Good for families. Lyon leads by 12 points.12
BilbaoLyon
Score4759
Tourist attractions within 2 km1725
Park area within 2 km119 hectares120 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km02
Sights concentration. Lyon leads by 2 points.2
BilbaoLyon
Score5254
Notable places within 2 km7986
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Bilbao leads by 9 points.9
BilbaoLyon
Score7162
Price level global60.873.7
Daily budget€122€160
Year-round weather. Bilbao leads by 6 points.6
BilbaoLyon
Score7064
Monthly daytime high13.5 °C to 26.3 °C7 °C to 28 °C
Monthly rainfall53 mm to 170 mm43 mm to 101 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
Lyon
7
9
14
17
21
26
28
28
23
18
11
8
Sea temperature, °C
Bilbao
13
13
13
13
15
18
21
22
20
18
16
14
Lyon
No coastline within reach
Rainfall, mm
Bilbao
131
108
98
96
76
58
54
53
75
112
170
124
Lyon
51
43
50
68
82
73
66
68
84
101
88
54
Daylight, hours per day
Bilbao
9
11
12
13
15
15
15
14
13
11
10
9
Lyon
9
10
12
14
15
16
15
14
13
11
10
9
Sunshine, hours per day
Bilbao
3
3
5
5
6
6
6
6
5
4
3
3
Lyon
2
3
6
6
7
9
9
8
6
4
3
2

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. Bilbao: 1991-2020 normals, Bilbao / Sondica (4.1 km from centre). Lyon: 1991-2020 normals, Lyon / Bron (10.6 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromBilbaoLyon
MadridMAD
1 h 0 m
no fares
BIO · 5 km
1 h 45 m
no fares
LYS · 20 km
BarcelonaBCN
1 h 15 m
€58-78
BIO · 5 km
1 h 20 m
€70-92
LYS · 20 km
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
1 h 45 m
€62-91
BIO · 5 km
1 h 35 m
no fares
LYS · 20 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
1 h 35 m
€102
BIO · 5 km
1 h 10 m
no fares
LYS · 20 km
FrankfurtFRA, HHN
2 h 0 m
no fares
BIO · 5 km
1 h 20 m
€195-211
2 stops
LYS · 20 km
AmsterdamAMS
2 h 0 m
€196-210
1 stop
BIO · 5 km
1 h 30 m
no fares
LYS · 20 km
IstanbulIST, SAW
3 h 45 m
€192-214
BIO · 5 km
3 h 0 m
€167-217
LYS · 20 km
PalmaPMI
1 h 25 m
no fares
BIO · 5 km
1 h 30 m
no fares
LYS · 20 km
MarrakechRAK
2 h 15 m
no fares
BIO · 5 km
2 h 55 m
€105-126
LYS · 20 km
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
7 h 20 m
no fares
BIO · 5 km
8 h 0 m
no fares
GVA · 111 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

MeasureBilbaoLyon
Official languageSpanishFrench
CurrencyEuro (EUR)Euro (EUR)
SocketsCF230 V, 50 HzCE230 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideRightRight
Time zoneUTC+1, UTC+2 in summerUTC+1, UTC+2 in summer
Emergency number112112
Elevation19 m160 m
Main airportBilbao Airport (BIO)5 km from centre70 non-stop destinationsLyon Saint-Exupéry Airport (LYS)20 km from centre139 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year13 days11 days

By the numbers

MeasureBilbaoLyon
City population351,124519,127
People per km²8,44010,838
Museums within 10 km1742
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km12
Distinct cuisines in the centre54148
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 Lyon 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.