VacationSelector

Cardiff or Lisbon?

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

Your match

Cardiff
48
match

Has no clear advantage with the weighting you have chosen.

Lisbon
✓ Best match
68
match

Wins on good for families 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.

CardiffLisbon
Beaches & swimming. Lisbon leads by 11 points.11
CardiffLisbon
Score4657
Swim season months00
Beaches 10 km824
Coast distance2 km2 km
Water distance2 km2 km
Places to eat. Lisbon leads by 20 points.20
CardiffLisbon
Score6080
Restaurants within 2 km of centre5412,496
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km3231
Museums & heritage. Lisbon leads by 31 points.31
CardiffLisbon
Score3970
Museums within 10 km61124
Museums within 2 km of centre654
Share of museums within 2 km %1044
Unesco sites within 50 km13
Nightlife. Lisbon leads by 17 points.17
CardiffLisbon
Score4865
Drinking venues within 4 km5361,225
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre395956
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %7478
Nightclubs within 4 km3565
Nature & day trips. Lisbon leads by 6 points.6
CardiffLisbon
Score5056
Protected land share 50 km %1811
Landscape blanket share 50 km %150
Land share of disc %6854
Park area within 2 km88 hectares77 hectares
Good for families. Lisbon leads by 37 points.37
CardiffLisbon
Score3269
Tourist attractions within 2 km482
Park area within 2 km88 hectares77 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km21
Sights concentration. Lisbon leads by 21 points.21
CardiffLisbon
Score4566
Notable places within 2 km51169
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Lisbon leads by 20 points.20
CardiffLisbon
Score5474
Price level global84.955.9
Daily budget€109
Year-round weather. Lisbon leads by 24 points.24
CardiffLisbon
Score5478
Monthly daytime high7.7 °C to 20.2 °C14.9 °C to 28.4 °C
Monthly rainfall49 mm to 87 mm3 mm to 121 mm
Dry months04
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
Cardiff
8
8
10
13
16
18
20
20
18
14
11
9
Lisbon
15
16
19
20
23
26
28
28
26
23
18
15
Sea temperature, °C
Cardiff
8
7
8
9
12
15
17
18
17
15
12
9
Lisbon
15
15
15
15
16
18
18
19
19
18
17
16
Rainfall, mm
Cardiff
77
55
49
54
56
56
61
66
54
87
83
79
Lisbon
104
73
72
67
53
13
3
7
36
108
121
102
Daylight, hours per day
Cardiff
8
10
12
14
16
17
16
15
13
11
9
8
Lisbon
10
11
12
13
14
15
15
14
13
11
10
10
Sunshine, hours per day
Cardiff
2
3
4
6
7
7
7
6
5
4
2
2
Lisbon
5
6
7
8
10
11
12
11
8
7
5
5

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. Cardiff: 1991-2020 normals, Cardiff-Wales Airport (14.9 km from centre). Lisbon: 1991-2020 normals, Lisboa / Geof (1.1 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromCardiffLisbon
MadridMAD
2 h 5 m
no fares
BRS · 34 km
1 h 15 m
€64-74
LIS · 7 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
1 h 10 m
no fares
BRS · 34 km
2 h 25 m
€118-145
LIS · 7 km
FunchalFNC
3 h 25 m
no fares
BRS · 34 km
1 h 50 m
€132-180
LIS · 7 km
BarcelonaBCN
2 h 5 m
no fares
BRS · 34 km
1 h 50 m
€74-97
LIS · 7 km
GenevaGVA
1 h 40 m
no fares
BRS · 34 km
2 h 25 m
€171-195
LIS · 7 km
MilanMXP, BGY, LIN
1 h 55 m
€85-113
1 stop
BRS · 34 km
2 h 35 m
€124-144
LIS · 7 km
AmsterdamAMS
1 h 20 m
no fares
CWL · 15 km
2 h 50 m
€167-189
LIS · 7 km
ZurichZRH
1 h 45 m
no fares
BRS · 34 km
2 h 40 m
€227-271
1 stop
LIS · 7 km
MarrakechRAK
3 h 20 m
no fares
BRS · 34 km
1 h 35 m
€95-118
LIS · 7 km
TorontoYYZ, YHM, YTZ
7 h 10 m
no fares
CWL · 15 km
7 h 25 m
€480-569
2 stops
LIS · 7 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 2026-09, 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

MeasureCardiffLisbon
Official languageEnglishPortuguese
CurrencyPound Sterling (GBP)Euro (EUR)
SocketsG230 V, 50 HzCF230 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideLeftRight
Time zoneUTC, UTC+1 in summerUTC, UTC+1 in summer
Emergency number112 or 999112
Elevation41 m100 m
Main airportCardiff International Airport (CWL)15 km from centre8 non-stop destinationsLisbon Humberto Delgado Airport (LIS)7 km from centre153 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year8 days14 days

By the numbers

MeasureCardiffLisbon
City population383,536545,796
People per km²2,7345,453
Museums within 10 km978
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km13
Distinct cuisines in the centre55106
Swim season, months above 21 °CNoneNone

Where else could you go?

Every comparison below shares a destination with this one, so you can follow Cardiff or Lisbon 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). Exchange rates via Frankfurter, based on European Central Bank reference rates. 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. Tourism statistics from Eurostat, © European Union, reused under CC BY 4.0. 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.