VacationSelector

Cardiff or Malaga?

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

Your match

Cardiff
48
match

Wins on sights concentration and nature & day trips with your weighting.

Malaga
✓ Best match
59
match

Wins on year-round weather and 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.

CardiffMalaga
Beaches & swimming. Malaga leads by 20 points.20
CardiffMalaga
Score4666
Swim season months03
Beaches 10 km821
Coast distance2 km0 km
Water distance2 km0 km
Places to eat. Malaga leads by 9 points.9
CardiffMalaga
Score6069
Restaurants within 2 km of centre5411,002
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km3234
Museums & heritage. Malaga leads by 14 points.14
CardiffMalaga
Score3953
Museums within 10 km6140
Museums within 2 km of centre635
Share of museums within 2 km %1088
Unesco sites within 50 km11
Nightlife. Malaga leads by 6 points.6
CardiffMalaga
Score4854
Drinking venues within 4 km536715
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre395486
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %7468
Nightclubs within 4 km3545
Nature & day trips. Cardiff leads by 7 points.7
CardiffMalaga
Score5043
Protected land share 50 km %187
Landscape blanket share 50 km %150
Land share of disc %6863
Park area within 2 km88 hectares85 hectares
Good for families. Malaga leads by 21 points.21
CardiffMalaga
Score3253
Tourist attractions within 2 km433
Park area within 2 km88 hectares85 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km20
Sights concentration. Cardiff leads by 8 points.8
CardiffMalaga
Score4537
Notable places within 2 km5133
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Malaga leads by 17 points.17
CardiffMalaga
Score5471
Price level global84.960.8
Daily budget€122
Year-round weather. Malaga leads by 28 points.28
CardiffMalaga
Score5482
Monthly daytime high7.7 °C to 20.2 °C17.2 °C to 31.5 °C
Monthly rainfall49 mm to 87 mm0 mm to 88 mm
Dry months05
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
Malaga
17
18
20
22
25
29
31
32
28
24
20
18
Sea temperature, °C
Cardiff
8
7
8
9
12
15
17
18
17
15
12
9
Malaga
15
15
15
16
18
20
22
23
22
20
17
16
Rainfall, mm
Cardiff
77
55
49
54
56
56
61
66
54
87
83
79
Malaga
62
55
66
41
23
4
0
3
25
60
78
88
Daylight, hours per day
Cardiff
8
10
12
14
16
17
16
15
13
11
9
8
Malaga
10
11
12
13
14
15
14
14
13
11
10
10
Sunshine, hours per day
Cardiff
2
3
4
6
7
7
7
6
5
4
2
2
Malaga
6
6
7
8
10
11
12
11
8
7
6
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). Malaga: 1991-2020 normals, Malaga / Aeropuerto (8.2 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromCardiffMalaga
BarcelonaBCN
2 h 5 m
no fares
BRS · 34 km
1 h 35 m
€73-109
AGP · 9 km
AmsterdamAMS
1 h 20 m
no fares
CWL · 15 km
2 h 55 m
€146-177
AGP · 9 km
PalmaPMI
2 h 20 m
no fares
BRS · 34 km
1 h 30 m
no fares
AGP · 9 km
MadridMAD
2 h 5 m
no fares
BRS · 34 km
1 h 10 m
no fares
AGP · 9 km
DublinDUB
1 h 0 m
no fares
CWL · 15 km
2 h 50 m
€122-139
1 stop
AGP · 9 km
Las PalmasLPA
4 h 0 m
no fares
BRS · 34 km
2 h 20 m
no fares
AGP · 9 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
1 h 10 m
no fares
BRS · 34 km
2 h 25 m
€92
AGP · 9 km
MilanMXP, BGY, LIN
1 h 55 m
€85-113
1 stop
BRS · 34 km
2 h 25 m
€61-88
AGP · 9 km
Puerto del RosarioFUE
3 h 50 m
no fares
BRS · 34 km
2 h 10 m
no fares
AGP · 9 km
MarrakechRAK
3 h 20 m
no fares
BRS · 34 km
1 h 25 m
€58-149
AGP · 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 2026-09, 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

MeasureCardiffMalaga
Official languageEnglishSpanish
CurrencyPound Sterling (GBP)Euro (EUR)
SocketsG230 V, 50 HzCF230 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideLeftRight
Time zoneUTC, UTC+1 in summerUTC+1, UTC+2 in summer
Emergency number112 or 999112
Elevation41 m18 m
Main airportCardiff International Airport (CWL)15 km from centre8 non-stop destinationsMálaga-Costa del Sol Airport (AGP)9 km from centre165 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year8 days12 days

By the numbers

MeasureCardiffMalaga
City population383,536599,063
People per km²2,7341,517
Museums within 10 km932
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km11
Distinct cuisines in the centre5565
Swim season, months above 21 °CNone3 months

Where else could you go?

Every comparison below shares a destination with this one, so you can follow Cardiff or Malaga 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.