VacationSelector

Bilbao or Manchester?

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 nature & day trips and value for money with your weighting.

Manchester
47
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.

BilbaoManchester
Beaches & swimming. Bilbao leads by 3 points.3
BilbaoManchester
Score3128
Swim season months10
Beaches 10 km110
Coast distance0 km27 km
Water distance0 km27 km
Places to eat. Manchester leads by 6 points.6
BilbaoManchester
Score6268
Restaurants within 2 km of centre840853
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km2635
Museums & heritage. Manchester leads by 4 points.4
BilbaoManchester
Score3842
Museums within 10 km2523
Museums within 2 km of centre1211
Share of museums within 2 km %4848
Unesco sites within 50 km12
Nightlife. Manchester leads by 4 points.4
BilbaoManchester
Score5862
Drinking venues within 4 km8691,029
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre730792
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %8477
Nightclubs within 4 km5082
Nature & day trips. Bilbao leads by 17 points.17
BilbaoManchester
Score5336
Protected land share 50 km %1117
Landscape blanket share 50 km %017
Land share of disc %7099
Park area within 2 km119 hectares63 hectares
Good for families. Bilbao leads by 15 points.15
BilbaoManchester
Score4732
Tourist attractions within 2 km175
Park area within 2 km119 hectares63 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km02
Sights concentration. Bilbao leads by 4 points.4
BilbaoManchester
Score5248
Notable places within 2 km7961
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Bilbao leads by 17 points.17
BilbaoManchester
Score7154
Price level global60.884.9
Daily budget€122
Year-round weather. Bilbao leads by 16 points.16
BilbaoManchester
Score7054
Monthly daytime high13.5 °C to 26.3 °C7.2 °C to 20.8 °C
Monthly rainfall53 mm to 170 mm51 mm to 95 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
Manchester
7
8
10
13
17
19
21
20
18
14
10
8
Sea temperature, °C
Bilbao
13
13
13
13
15
18
21
22
20
18
16
14
Manchester
7
6
7
9
11
14
16
17
16
14
11
9
Rainfall, mm
Bilbao
131
108
98
96
76
58
54
53
75
112
170
124
Manchester
67
62
51
61
59
63
60
73
71
95
86
84
Daylight, hours per day
Bilbao
9
11
12
13
15
15
15
14
13
11
10
9
Manchester
8
10
12
14
16
17
17
15
13
11
9
8
Sunshine, hours per day
Bilbao
3
3
5
5
6
6
6
6
5
4
3
3
Manchester
2
2
3
5
6
6
6
6
4
3
2
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). Manchester: 1991-2020 normals, Manchester Airport (14.8 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromBilbaoManchester
MadridMAD
1 h 0 m
no fares
BIO · 5 km
2 h 20 m
no fares
MAN · 15 km
BarcelonaBCN
1 h 15 m
€58-78
BIO · 5 km
2 h 15 m
no fares
MAN · 15 km
MalagaAGP
1 h 35 m
€77-114
BIO · 5 km
2 h 50 m
no fares
MAN · 15 km
PalmaPMI
1 h 25 m
no fares
BIO · 5 km
2 h 30 m
no fares
MAN · 15 km
MunichMUC
2 h 10 m
€203-242
1 stop
BIO · 5 km
2 h 0 m
no fares
MAN · 15 km
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
1 h 45 m
€62-91
BIO · 5 km
55 m
no fares
MAN · 15 km
TenerifeTFS, TFN
3 h 10 m
no fares
BIO · 5 km
4 h 15 m
no fares
MAN · 15 km
AlicanteALC
1 h 20 m
€81-137
BIO · 5 km
2 h 40 m
no fares
MAN · 15 km
MarrakechRAK
2 h 15 m
no fares
BIO · 5 km
3 h 35 m
no fares
MAN · 15 km
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
7 h 20 m
no fares
BIO · 5 km
7 h 0 m
no fares
MAN · 15 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

MeasureBilbaoManchester
Official languageSpanishEnglish
CurrencyEuro (EUR)Pound Sterling (GBP)
SocketsCF230 V, 50 HzG230 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideRightLeft
Time zoneUTC+1, UTC+2 in summerUTC, UTC+1 in summer
Emergency number112112 or 999
Elevation19 m38 m
Main airportBilbao Airport (BIO)5 km from centre70 non-stop destinationsManchester Airport (MAN)15 km from centre210 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year13 days8 days

By the numbers

MeasureBilbaoManchester
City population351,124547,627
People per km²8,4404,737
Museums within 10 km1728
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km12
Distinct cuisines in the centre5463
Swim season, months above 21 °C1 monthNone

Where else could you go?

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