VacationSelector

Bilbao or Montreal?

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 year-round weather with your weighting.

Montreal
47
match

Wins on places to eat and nightlife 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.

BilbaoMontreal
Beaches & swimming. Bilbao leads by 31 points.31
BilbaoMontreal
Score310
Swim season months10
Beaches 10 km17
Coast distance0 km276 km
Water distance0 km
Places to eat. Montreal leads by 12 points.12
BilbaoMontreal
Score6274
Restaurants within 2 km of centre8401,016
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km2649
Museums & heritage. Bilbao leads by 1 points.1
BilbaoMontreal
Score3837
Museums within 10 km2539
Museums within 2 km of centre1219
Share of museums within 2 km %4849
Unesco sites within 50 km10
Nightlife. Montreal leads by 4 points.4
BilbaoMontreal
Score5862
Drinking venues within 4 km8691,012
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre730493
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %8449
Nightclubs within 4 km5074
Nature & day trips. Bilbao leads by 17 points.17
BilbaoMontreal
Score5336
Protected land share 50 km %112
Landscape blanket share 50 km %00
Land share of disc %70100
Park area within 2 km119 hectares189 hectares
Good for families. Montreal leads by 3 points.3
BilbaoMontreal
Score4750
Tourist attractions within 2 km1711
Park area within 2 km119 hectares189 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km01
Sights concentration. Montreal leads by 4 points.4
BilbaoMontreal
Score5256
Notable places within 2 km7998
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Bilbao leads by 17 points.17
BilbaoMontreal
Score7154
Price level global60.884
Daily budget€122
Year-round weather. Bilbao leads by 20 points.20
BilbaoMontreal
Score7050
Monthly daytime high13.5 °C to 26.3 °C-3.5 °C to 26.5 °C
Monthly rainfall53 mm to 170 mm69 mm to 121 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
Montreal
-3
-3
3
11
19
24
27
26
22
13
6
-1
Sea temperature, °C
Bilbao
13
13
13
13
15
18
21
22
20
18
16
14
Montreal
No coastline within reach
Rainfall, mm
Bilbao
131
108
98
96
76
58
54
53
75
112
170
124
Montreal
84
69
89
121
89
107
98
109
88
100
85
94
Daylight, hours per day
Bilbao
9
11
12
13
15
15
15
14
13
11
10
9
Montreal
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
Montreal
3
4
6
6
8
8
9
8
7
4
3
3

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. Bilbao: 1991-2020 normals, Bilbao / Sondica (4.1 km from centre). Montreal: 1991-2020 normals, Montreal McTavish (3.2 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromBilbaoMontreal
MadridMAD
1 h 0 m
no fares
BIO · 5 km
7 h 10 m
no fares
YUL · 16 km
BarcelonaBCN
1 h 15 m
€58-78
BIO · 5 km
7 h 35 m
no fares
YUL · 16 km
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
1 h 45 m
€62-91
BIO · 5 km
6 h 50 m
€447-599
1 stop
YUL · 16 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
1 h 35 m
€102
BIO · 5 km
7 h 10 m
€308-372
YUL · 16 km
AmsterdamAMS
2 h 0 m
€196-210
1 stop
BIO · 5 km
7 h 10 m
no fares
YUL · 16 km
FrankfurtFRA, HHN
2 h 0 m
no fares
BIO · 5 km
7 h 35 m
€591-764
2 stops
YUL · 16 km
MalagaAGP
1 h 35 m
€77-114
BIO · 5 km
7 h 25 m
no fares
YUL · 16 km
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
7 h 20 m
no fares
BIO · 5 km
1 h 20 m
€231-372
1 stop
YUL · 16 km
PalmaPMI
1 h 25 m
no fares
BIO · 5 km
7 h 50 m
no fares
YUL · 16 km
CasablancaCMN
2 h 5 m
no fares
BIO · 5 km
7 h 20 m
no fares
YUL · 16 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

MeasureBilbaoMontreal
Official languageSpanishFrench, English
CurrencyEuro (EUR)Canadian Dollar (CAD)
SocketsCF230 V, 50 HzAB120 V, 60 Hz
Driving sideRightRight
Time zoneUTC+1, UTC+2 in summerUTC-5, UTC-4 in summer
Emergency number112911
Elevation19 m31 m
Main airportBilbao Airport (BIO)5 km from centre70 non-stop destinationsMontreal / Pierre Elliott Trudeau International Airport (YUL)16 km from centre164 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year13 days10 days

By the numbers

MeasureBilbaoMontreal
City population351,1241,895,211
People per km²8,4403,806
Museums within 10 km1737
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km10
Distinct cuisines in the centre5497
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 Montreal 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.