VacationSelector

Buenos Aires or San Jose?

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 sights concentration and museums & heritage with your weighting.

San Jose
39
match

Wins on nature & day trips and year-round weather 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 AiresSan Jose
Beaches & swimming. Buenos Aires leads by 25 points.25
Buenos AiresSan Jose
Score338
Swim season months40
Beaches 10 km01
Coast distance2 km14 km
Water distance2 km14 km
Places to eat. Buenos Aires leads by 26 points.26
Buenos AiresSan Jose
Score6741
Restaurants within 2 km of centre1,197313
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km2616
Museums & heritage. Buenos Aires leads by 40 points.40
Buenos AiresSan Jose
Score6626
Museums within 10 km14820
Museums within 2 km of centre719
Share of museums within 2 km %4845
Unesco sites within 50 km10
Nightlife. Buenos Aires leads by 37 points.37
Buenos AiresSan Jose
Score6831
Drinking venues within 4 km1,295231
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre77788
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %6038
Nightclubs within 4 km16016
Nature & day trips. San Jose leads by 27 points.27
Buenos AiresSan Jose
Score4370
Protected land share 50 km %926
Landscape blanket share 50 km %12
Land share of disc %6791
Park area within 2 km69 hectares101 hectares
Good for families. Buenos Aires leads by 36 points.36
Buenos AiresSan Jose
Score6933
Tourist attractions within 2 km492
Park area within 2 km69 hectares101 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km62
Sights concentration. Buenos Aires leads by 46 points.46
Buenos AiresSan Jose
Score6014
Notable places within 2 km1259
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Buenos Aires leads by 39 points.39
Buenos AiresSan Jose
Score8243
Price level global45.8100
Daily budget
Year-round weather. San Jose leads by 10 points.10
Buenos AiresSan Jose
Score7585
Monthly daytime high14.7 °C to 28.5 °C15.4 °C to 26.8 °C
Monthly rainfall50 mm to 135 mm0 mm to 78 mm
Dry months08
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
San Jose
15
17
19
21
23
26
27
27
27
24
19
17
Sea temperature, °C
Buenos Aires
25
25
23
21
17
14
13
13
15
18
21
23
San Jose
12
12
12
12
12
13
14
15
15
14
13
13
Rainfall, mm
Buenos Aires
135
94
123
122
85
54
50
52
58
98
87
107
San Jose
50
78
51
25
9
2
0
0
2
15
33
62
Daylight, hours per day
Buenos Aires
14
13
12
11
10
10
10
11
12
13
14
14
San Jose
10
11
12
13
14
15
15
14
13
11
10
10
Sunshine, hours per day
Buenos Aires
10
8
8
6
6
4
5
6
6
7
8
9
San Jose
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). San Jose: 1991-2020 normals, San Jose / Santa Clara Trailer Village (8.2 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromBuenos AiresSan Jose
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
10 h 40 m
no fares
EZE · 28 km
5 h 35 m
€286-328
1 stop
SFO · 57 km
MadridMAD
12 h 30 m
€961-982
EZE · 28 km
11 h 40 m
no fares
SFO · 57 km
FrankfurtFRA, HHN
14 h 10 m
€1,193-1373
3 stops
EZE · 28 km
11 h 25 m
no fares
SFO · 57 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
13 h 45 m
€1,227-1245
2 stops
EZE · 28 km
11 h 15 m
no fares
SFO · 57 km
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
13 h 45 m
€1,147-1238
2 stops
EZE · 28 km
10 h 50 m
no fares
SFO · 57 km
TorontoYYZ, YHM, YTZ
11 h 15 m
no fares
EZE · 28 km
4 h 55 m
€339-541
1 stop
SFO · 57 km
DallasDFW, DAL, AFW
10 h 40 m
no fares
EZE · 28 km
3 h 25 m
no fares
SFO · 57 km
MiamiMIA, OPF
9 h 5 m
no fares
EZE · 28 km
5 h 35 m
no fares
SFO · 57 km
DubaiDXB, DWC
16 h 45 m
€1,481-1680
EZE · 28 km
16 h 0 m
€1,005-1027
1 stop
SFO · 57 km
ShanghaiPVG, SHA
23 h 45 m
no fares
EZE · 28 km
12 h 15 m
no fares
SFO · 57 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 AiresSan Jose
Official languageSpanish
CurrencyArgentine Peso (ARS)US Dollar (USD)
SocketsCI220 V, 50 HzAB120 V, 60 Hz
Driving sideLeftRight
Time zoneUTC-3UTC-8, UTC-7 in summer
Emergency number117 or 911911
Elevation25 m25 m
Main airportEzeiza International Airport - Ministro Pistarini (EZE)28 km from centre53 non-stop destinationsMineta San Jose International Airport (SJC)8 km from centre17 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year16 days13 days

By the numbers

MeasureBuenos AiresSan Jose
City population3,121,7071,013,240
People per km²15,3552,167
Museums within 10 km7519
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km10
Distinct cuisines in the centre5530
Swim season, months above 21 °C4 monthsNone

Where else could you go?

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