VacationSelector

Buenos Aires or Shanghai?

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.

Shanghai
54
match

Wins on good for families 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 AiresShanghai
Beaches & swimming. Buenos Aires leads by 16 points.16
Buenos AiresShanghai
Score3317
Swim season months45
Beaches 10 km00
Coast distance2 km18 km
Water distance2 km18 km
Places to eatWe cannot measure this for Shanghai.
Museums & heritage. Buenos Aires leads by 21 points.21
Buenos AiresShanghai
Score6645
Museums within 10 km148108
Museums within 2 km of centre7128
Share of museums within 2 km %4826
Unesco sites within 50 km10
NightlifeWe cannot measure this for Shanghai.
Nature & day trips. Buenos Aires leads by 1 points.1
Buenos AiresShanghai
Score4342
Protected land share 50 km %99
Landscape blanket share 50 km %10
Land share of disc %6782
Park area within 2 km69 hectares83 hectares
Good for families. Shanghai leads by 12 points.12
Buenos AiresShanghai
Score6981
Tourist attractions within 2 km4986
Park area within 2 km69 hectares83 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km610
Sights concentration. Buenos Aires leads by 9 points.9
Buenos AiresShanghai
Score6051
Notable places within 2 km12573
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Buenos Aires leads by 3 points.3
Buenos AiresShanghai
Score8279
Price level global45.849
Daily budget
Year-round weather. Buenos Aires leads by 10 points.10
Buenos AiresShanghai
Score7565
Monthly daytime high14.7 °C to 28.5 °C8.5 °C to 33.2 °C
Monthly rainfall50 mm to 135 mm43 mm to 216 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
Shanghai
9
11
15
21
26
28
33
33
29
23
18
12
Sea temperature, °C
Buenos Aires
25
25
23
21
17
14
13
13
15
18
21
23
Shanghai
8
7
10
14
19
22
26
28
26
21
17
12
Rainfall, mm
Buenos Aires
135
94
123
122
85
54
50
52
58
98
87
107
Shanghai
69
65
88
72
84
192
151
216
97
64
53
43
Daylight, hours per day
Buenos Aires
14
13
12
11
10
10
10
11
12
13
14
14
Shanghai
10
11
12
13
14
14
14
13
12
11
11
10
Sunshine, hours per day
Buenos Aires
10
8
8
6
6
4
5
6
6
7
8
9
Shanghai
4
4
5
5
6
4
6
6
5
5
4
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). Shanghai: 1991-2020 normals, Shanghai / Hongqiao (8.1 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromBuenos AiresShanghai
MadridMAD
12 h 30 m
€961-982
EZE · 28 km
12 h 45 m
no fares
PVG · 33 km
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
13 h 45 m
€1,147-1238
2 stops
EZE · 28 km
11 h 30 m
€528-630
1 stop
PVG · 33 km
RomeFCO, CIA
13 h 45 m
€1,021-1169
1 stop
EZE · 28 km
11 h 25 m
no fares
PVG · 33 km
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
10 h 40 m
no fares
EZE · 28 km
14 h 40 m
no fares
PVG · 33 km
DubaiDXB, DWC
16 h 45 m
€1,481-1680
EZE · 28 km
8 h 15 m
€508-557
1 stop
PVG · 33 km
FrankfurtFRA, HHN
14 h 10 m
€1,193-1373
3 stops
EZE · 28 km
11 h 5 m
no fares
PVG · 33 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
13 h 45 m
€1,227-1245
2 stops
EZE · 28 km
11 h 35 m
no fares
PVG · 33 km
AmsterdamAMS
14 h 10 m
no fares
EZE · 28 km
11 h 10 m
no fares
PVG · 33 km
IstanbulIST, SAW
15 h 5 m
€965-1220
EZE · 28 km
10 h 5 m
no fares
PVG · 33 km
TorontoYYZ, YHM, YTZ
11 h 15 m
no fares
EZE · 28 km
14 h 5 m
no fares
PVG · 33 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 AiresShanghai
Official languageSpanishPutonghua
CurrencyArgentine Peso (ARS)Yuan Renminbi (CNY)
SocketsCI220 V, 50 HzACI220 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideLeftRight
Time zoneUTC-3UTC+8
Emergency number117 or 911Police 110, ambulance 120, fire 119
Elevation25 m4 m
Main airportEzeiza International Airport - Ministro Pistarini (EZE)28 km from centre53 non-stop destinationsShanghai Pudong International Airport (PVG)33 km from centre200 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year16 days6 days

By the numbers

MeasureBuenos AiresShanghai
City population3,121,70724,870,895
People per km²15,3553,922
Museums within 10 km7544
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km10
Distinct cuisines in the centre5564
Swim season, months above 21 °C4 months5 months

Where else could you go?

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