VacationSelector

Buenos Aires or Lima?

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

Your match

Buenos Aires
✓ Best match
63
match

Wins on nightlife and nature & day trips with your weighting.

Lima
55
match

Wins on year-round weather and beaches & swimming 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.

Buenos AiresLima
Beaches & swimming. Lima leads by 4 points.4
Buenos AiresLima
Score3337
Swim season months42
Beaches 10 km012
Coast distance2 km6 km
Water distance2 km6 km
Places to eat. Buenos Aires leads by 15 points.15
Buenos AiresLima
Score6752
Restaurants within 2 km of centre1,197796
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km2614
Museums & heritage. Buenos Aires leads by 2 points.2
Buenos AiresLima
Score6664
Museums within 10 km14889
Museums within 2 km of centre7147
Share of museums within 2 km %4853
Unesco sites within 50 km12
Nightlife. Buenos Aires leads by 23 points.23
Buenos AiresLima
Score6845
Drinking venues within 4 km1,295409
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre777177
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %6043
Nightclubs within 4 km16063
Nature & day trips. Buenos Aires leads by 16 points.16
Buenos AiresLima
Score4327
Protected land share 50 km %92
Landscape blanket share 50 km %10
Land share of disc %6751
Park area within 2 km69 hectares54 hectares
Good for families. Buenos Aires leads by 13 points.13
Buenos AiresLima
Score6956
Tourist attractions within 2 km4925
Park area within 2 km69 hectares54 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km64
Sights concentration. Buenos Aires leads by 14 points.14
Buenos AiresLima
Score6046
Notable places within 2 km12554
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Buenos Aires leads by 2 points.2
Buenos AiresLima
Score8280
Price level global45.847.7
Daily budget
Year-round weather. Lima leads by 17 points.17
Buenos AiresLima
Score7592
Monthly daytime high14.7 °C to 28.5 °C18.6 °C to 27.4 °C
Monthly rainfall50 mm to 135 mm0 mm to 1 mm
Dry months012
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
Buenos Aires
29
27
26
22
19
16
15
17
18
22
24
28
Lima
26
27
27
25
22
20
19
19
19
20
22
24
Sea temperature, °C
Buenos Aires
25
25
23
21
17
14
13
13
15
18
21
23
Lima
21
22
21
20
19
18
18
17
17
17
18
19
Rainfall, mm
Buenos Aires
135
94
123
122
85
54
50
52
58
98
87
107
Lima
1
1
0
0
1
1
1
1
1
1
0
1
Daylight, hours per day
Buenos Aires
14
13
12
11
10
10
10
11
12
13
14
14
Lima
13
13
12
12
12
11
12
12
12
12
13
13
Sunshine, hours per day
Buenos Aires
10
8
8
6
6
4
5
6
6
7
8
9
Lima
5
5
6
6
3
1
1
1
1
2
3
4

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. Buenos Aires: 1991-2020 normals, Aeroparque Bs. As. Aerodrome (4.9 km from centre). Lima: 1991-2020 normals, Lima-Callao / Aerop. Internacional Jorgechavez (10.9 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromBuenos AiresLima
SantiagoSCL
2 h 0 m
€156-221
EZE · 28 km
3 h 35 m
€181-198
LIM · 9 km
Rio de JaneiroGIG, SDU, RRJ
3 h 0 m
€225-302
EZE · 28 km
5 h 5 m
no fares
LIM · 9 km
Sao PauloGRU, VCP, CGH, RTE
2 h 40 m
€283-314
EZE · 28 km
4 h 45 m
€282-372
LIM · 9 km
MadridMAD
12 h 30 m
€961-982
EZE · 28 km
11 h 50 m
€895-903
LIM · 9 km
MiamiMIA, OPF
9 h 5 m
no fares
EZE · 28 km
5 h 40 m
€403-426
1 stop
LIM · 9 km
GuayaquilGYE
5 h 40 m
no fares
EZE · 28 km
2 h 0 m
no fares
LIM · 9 km
BogotaBOG
6 h 10 m
no fares
EZE · 28 km
2 h 55 m
no fares
LIM · 9 km
Punta CanaPUJ
7 h 45 m
no fares
EZE · 28 km
4 h 50 m
no fares
LIM · 9 km
QuitoUIO
5 h 50 m
no fares
EZE · 28 km
2 h 15 m
no fares
LIM · 9 km
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
10 h 40 m
no fares
EZE · 28 km
7 h 35 m
no fares
LIM · 9 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 2026-09 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

MeasureBuenos AiresLima
Official languageSpanishSpanish, Aymara, Quechua
CurrencyArgentine Peso (ARS)Sol (PEN)
SocketsCI220 V, 50 HzABC220 V, 60 Hz
Driving sideLeftRight
Time zoneUTC-3UTC-5
Emergency number117 or 911111 or 911
Elevation25 m154 m
Main airportEzeiza International Airport - Ministro Pistarini (EZE)28 km from centre53 non-stop destinationsJorge Chávez International Airport (LIM)9 km from centre63 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year16 days14 days

By the numbers

MeasureBuenos AiresLima
City population3,121,7079,943,800
People per km²15,3553,721
Museums within 10 km7546
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km12
Distinct cuisines in the centre5533
Swim season, months above 21 °C4 months2 months

Where else could you go?

Every comparison below shares a destination with this one, so you can follow Buenos Aires or Lima 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). 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.