VacationSelector

Buenos Aires or Ottawa?

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 museums & heritage and beaches & swimming with your weighting.

Ottawa
43
match

Has no clear advantage with the weighting you have chosen.

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 AiresOttawa
Beaches & swimming. Buenos Aires leads by 33 points.33
Buenos AiresOttawa
Score330
Swim season months40
Beaches 10 km09
Coast distance2 km423 km
Water distance2 km
Places to eat. Buenos Aires leads by 3 points.3
Buenos AiresOttawa
Score6764
Restaurants within 2 km of centre1,197684
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km2634
Museums & heritage. Buenos Aires leads by 34 points.34
Buenos AiresOttawa
Score6632
Museums within 10 km14815
Museums within 2 km of centre718
Share of museums within 2 km %4853
Unesco sites within 50 km11
Nightlife. Buenos Aires leads by 24 points.24
Buenos AiresOttawa
Score6844
Drinking venues within 4 km1,295432
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre777303
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %6070
Nightclubs within 4 km16035
Nature & day trips. Buenos Aires leads by 2 points.2
Buenos AiresOttawa
Score4341
Protected land share 50 km %98
Landscape blanket share 50 km %10
Land share of disc %67100
Park area within 2 km69 hectares122 hectares
Good for families. Buenos Aires leads by 23 points.23
Buenos AiresOttawa
Score6946
Tourist attractions within 2 km4911
Park area within 2 km69 hectares122 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km61
Sights concentration. Buenos Aires leads by 10 points.10
Buenos AiresOttawa
Score6050
Notable places within 2 km12571
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Buenos Aires leads by 28 points.28
Buenos AiresOttawa
Score8254
Price level global45.884
Daily budget
Year-round weather. Buenos Aires leads by 22 points.22
Buenos AiresOttawa
Score7553
Monthly daytime high14.7 °C to 28.5 °C-4.9 °C to 27 °C
Monthly rainfall50 mm to 135 mm53 mm to 94 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
Buenos Aires
29
27
26
22
19
16
15
17
18
22
24
28
Ottawa
-5
-3
3
11
19
24
27
26
22
14
6
-2
Sea temperature, °C
Buenos Aires
25
25
23
21
17
14
13
13
15
18
21
23
Ottawa
No coastline within reach
Rainfall, mm
Buenos Aires
135
94
123
122
85
54
50
52
58
98
87
107
Ottawa
60
53
56
74
66
87
82
89
78
94
59
80
Daylight, hours per day
Buenos Aires
14
13
12
11
10
10
10
11
12
13
14
14
Ottawa
9
10
12
14
15
16
15
14
13
11
10
9
Sunshine, hours per day
Buenos Aires
10
8
8
6
6
4
5
6
6
7
8
9
Ottawa
No sunshine record

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). Ottawa: 1991-2020 normals, Ottawa CDA RCS (5.3 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromBuenos AiresOttawa
TorontoYYZ, YHM, YTZ
11 h 15 m
no fares
EZE · 28 km
1 h 5 m
no fares
YOW · 12 km
CancunCUN
8 h 45 m
no fares
EZE · 28 km
4 h 5 m
no fares
YOW · 12 km
Punta CanaPUJ
7 h 45 m
no fares
EZE · 28 km
4 h 15 m
no fares
YOW · 12 km
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
10 h 40 m
no fares
EZE · 28 km
1 h 20 m
no fares
YOW · 12 km
MiamiMIA, OPF
9 h 5 m
no fares
EZE · 28 km
3 h 15 m
no fares
YOW · 12 km
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
13 h 45 m
€1,147-1238
2 stops
EZE · 28 km
6 h 55 m
no fares
YOW · 12 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
13 h 45 m
€1,227-1245
2 stops
EZE · 28 km
7 h 20 m
no fares
YOW · 12 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 AiresOttawa
Official languageSpanishFrench, English
CurrencyArgentine Peso (ARS)Canadian Dollar (CAD)
SocketsCI220 V, 50 HzAB120 V, 60 Hz
Driving sideLeftRight
Time zoneUTC-3UTC-5, UTC-4 in summer
Emergency number117 or 911911
Elevation25 m70 m
Main airportEzeiza International Airport - Ministro Pistarini (EZE)28 km from centre53 non-stop destinationsOttawa Macdonald-Cartier International Airport (YOW)12 km from centre46 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year16 days11 days

By the numbers

MeasureBuenos AiresOttawa
City population3,121,7071,017,449
People per km²15,355366
Museums within 10 km7520
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km11
Distinct cuisines in the centre5562
Swim season, months above 21 °C4 months

Where else could you go?

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