VacationSelector

Bilbao or New Orleans?

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.

New Orleans
47
match

Wins on beaches & swimming 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.

BilbaoNew Orleans
Beaches & swimming. New Orleans leads by 8 points.8
BilbaoNew Orleans
Score3139
Swim season months17
Beaches 10 km13
Coast distance0 km21 km
Water distance0 km17 km
Places to eat. Bilbao leads by 1 points.1
BilbaoNew Orleans
Score6261
Restaurants within 2 km of centre840803
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km2625
Museums & heritage. New Orleans leads by 7 points.7
BilbaoNew Orleans
Score3845
Museums within 10 km2542
Museums within 2 km of centre1230
Share of museums within 2 km %4871
Unesco sites within 50 km10
Nightlife. Bilbao leads by 4 points.4
BilbaoNew Orleans
Score5854
Drinking venues within 4 km869704
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre730495
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %8470
Nightclubs within 4 km5041
Nature & day trips. Bilbao leads by 28 points.28
BilbaoNew Orleans
Score5325
Protected land share 50 km %114
Landscape blanket share 50 km %00
Land share of disc %7089
Park area within 2 km119 hectares43 hectares
Good for families. Bilbao leads by 1 points.1
BilbaoNew Orleans
Score4746
Tourist attractions within 2 km1722
Park area within 2 km119 hectares43 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km01
Sights concentration. Bilbao leads by 12 points.12
BilbaoNew Orleans
Score5240
Notable places within 2 km7940
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Bilbao leads by 28 points.28
BilbaoNew Orleans
Score7143
Price level global60.8100
Daily budget€122
Year-round weather. Bilbao leads by 2 points.2
BilbaoNew Orleans
Score7068
Monthly daytime high13.5 °C to 26.3 °C17.1 °C to 33 °C
Monthly rainfall53 mm to 170 mm94 mm to 194 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
New Orleans
17
19
23
26
30
32
33
33
31
27
22
18
Sea temperature, °C
Bilbao
13
13
13
13
15
18
21
22
20
18
16
14
New Orleans
14
15
18
22
25
29
30
30
28
24
20
16
Rainfall, mm
Bilbao
131
108
98
96
76
58
54
53
75
112
170
124
New Orleans
132
104
111
132
143
194
169
180
128
94
98
123
Daylight, hours per day
Bilbao
9
11
12
13
15
15
15
14
13
11
10
9
New Orleans
10
11
12
13
14
14
14
13
12
12
11
10
Sunshine, hours per day
Bilbao
3
3
5
5
6
6
6
6
5
4
3
3
New Orleans
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). New Orleans: 1991-2020 normals, New Orleans Airport (2.7 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromBilbaoNew Orleans
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
7 h 20 m
no fares
BIO · 5 km
2 h 55 m
€254-325
1 stop
MSY · 18 km
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
1 h 45 m
€62-91
BIO · 5 km
9 h 25 m
no fares
MSY · 18 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

MeasureBilbaoNew Orleans
Official languageSpanish
CurrencyEuro (EUR)US Dollar (USD)
SocketsCF230 V, 50 HzAB120 V, 60 Hz
Driving sideRightRight
Time zoneUTC+1, UTC+2 in summerUTC-6, UTC-5 in summer
Emergency number112911
Elevation19 m-2 m
Main airportBilbao Airport (BIO)5 km from centre70 non-stop destinationsLouis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport (MSY)18 km from centre50 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year13 days14 days

By the numbers

MeasureBilbaoNew Orleans
City population351,124383,997
People per km²8,440423
Museums within 10 km1716
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km10
Distinct cuisines in the centre5439
Swim season, months above 21 °C1 month7 months

Where else could you go?

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