VacationSelector

Cardiff or Paris?

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 beaches & swimming and nature & day trips with your weighting.

Paris
✓ Best match
67
match

Wins on sights concentration 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.

The verdict

Choose Cardiff if you want the coast within reach, with 8 beaches nearby, and a trip built around parks, day trips and a compact evening scene rather than dense city sightseeing.

Choose Paris if you want a centre where the notable places sit close together, about three times the museums, a far wider choice of restaurants and bars, and more laid on for children.

Scoreboard

Each measure scored 0 to 100. Open a row for the figures behind the score.

CardiffParis
Beaches & swimming. Cardiff leads by 46 points.46
CardiffParis
Score460
Swim season months00
Beaches 10 km82
Coast distance2 km149 km
Water distance2 km—
Places to eat. Paris leads by 30 points.30
CardiffParis
Score6090
Restaurants within 2 km of centre5414,732
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km3233
Museums & heritage. Paris leads by 37 points.37
CardiffParis
Score3976
Museums within 10 km61185
Museums within 2 km of centre665
Share of museums within 2 km %1035
Unesco sites within 50 km14
Nightlife. Paris leads by 40 points.40
CardiffParis
Score4888
Drinking venues within 4 km5363,796
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre3951,694
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %7445
Nightclubs within 4 km35201
Nature & day trips. Cardiff leads by 2 points.2
CardiffParis
Score5048
Protected land share 50 km %1828
Landscape blanket share 50 km %1526
Land share of disc %68100
Park area within 2 km88 hectares82 hectares
Good for families. Paris leads by 43 points.43
CardiffParis
Score3275
Tourist attractions within 2 km489
Park area within 2 km88 hectares82 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km23
Sights concentration. Paris leads by 49 points.49
CardiffParis
Score4594
Notable places within 2 km51865
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Paris leads by 8 points.8
CardiffParis
Score5462
Price level global84.973.7
Daily budget—€160
Year-round weather. Paris leads by 12 points.12
CardiffParis
Score5466
Monthly daytime high7.7 °C to 20.2 °C7.8 °C to 26 °C
Monthly rainfall49 mm to 87 mm38 mm to 75 mm
Dry months01
0255075100

Where they differ

Cardiff has the coast: 8 beaches nearby against Paris's 2, though neither gets a month of sea at 21°C or more. Its bars and clubs are fewer, but most sit near the centre, so an evening needs little planning.

Paris packs many more notable places into walking distance of its centre, with many times as many family attractions and 3 theme parks within reach against Cardiff's 2. It also has about three times the museums, and 4 UNESCO-listed places within day-trip reach against Cardiff's 1.

Where they are alike

Neither city is mainly an outdoors destination, yet both keep green space close to the centre in similar measure, and both have protected country within day-trip reach, 28% of the land around Paris and 18% around Cardiff.

On weather they are closer than the summer figures suggest: both bottom out at 8°C in January, both stay damp through the cold months, and neither offers a month of sea warm enough for easy swimming.

Which traveller are you?

A couple after museums and dense sightseeing should take Paris: the notable places cluster within walking distance of the centre, and the museums, about three times Cardiff's number, sit tightly around that same area.

Families are better served in Paris too, with far more attractions near the centre and 3 theme parks within reach against Cardiff's 2, though Cardiff matches it for central park space when children need room to run.

Anyone who wants sea air and coast walks should pick Cardiff, which has 8 beaches nearby against Paris's 2 and water that warms to 18°C at its peak.

What the numbers don't tell you

No daily budget figure exists for Cardiff in this data, so the two cannot be compared on what a trip costs; Paris's €160 a day stands on its own, and the value ratings here rest on a different measure that both cities do have.

No weather station near Paris records sunshine hours, so that side of the weather comparison is unmeasured rather than poor. Cardiff's coast also needs reading carefully: 8 beaches nearby is a real difference, but the sea reaches only 18°C at its warmest, and the months either side of summer are the wettest of its year.

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
Paris
8
9
13
17
20
24
26
26
22
17
11
8
Sea temperature, °C
Cardiff
8
7
8
9
12
15
17
18
17
15
12
9
Paris
No coastline within reach
Rainfall, mm
Cardiff
77
55
49
54
56
56
61
66
54
87
83
79
Paris
45
38
41
45
75
51
58
54
51
55
54
62
Daylight, hours per day
Cardiff
8
10
12
14
16
17
16
15
13
11
9
8
Paris
9
10
12
14
15
16
16
14
13
11
9
8
Sunshine, hours per day
Cardiff
2
3
4
6
7
7
7
6
5
4
2
2
Paris
No sunshine record

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). Paris: 1991-2020 normals, Paris-Montsouris (4.6 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Cardiff is at its best in July and August, when highs reach 20°C and the sea peaks at 18°C. October and November are the stretch to avoid, at 83-87mm of rain, the wettest of its year.

Paris holds a longer usable season, June through September, with highs of 24-26°C and rain spread fairly evenly apart from a wetter May at 75mm. Outside that window the two converge, and winter in either is cool and damp.

Getting there

Flying fromCardiffParis
ToulouseTLS
1 h 45 m
no fares
BRS · 34 km
1 h 20 m
€84-111
ORY · 14 km
MilanMXP, BGY, LIN
1 h 55 m
€85-113
1 stop
BRS · 34 km
1 h 20 m
€61-89
CDG · 22 km
MadridMAD
2 h 5 m
no fares
BRS · 34 km
1 h 55 m
€107-141
ORY · 14 km
BarcelonaBCN
2 h 5 m
no fares
BRS · 34 km
1 h 40 m
€110-135
CDG · 22 km
NiceNCE
2 h 0 m
no fares
BRS · 34 km
1 h 30 m
€86-132
ORY · 14 km
Puerto del RosarioFUE
3 h 50 m
no fares
BRS · 34 km
3 h 45 m
no fares
ORY · 14 km
PalmaPMI
2 h 20 m
no fares
BRS · 34 km
1 h 50 m
no fares
ORY · 14 km
MarrakechRAK
3 h 20 m
no fares
BRS · 34 km
3 h 10 m
€130-199
ORY · 14 km
TorontoYYZ, YHM, YTZ
7 h 10 m
no fares
CWL · 15 km
7 h 45 m
€445-510
1 stop
CDG · 22 km
New DelhiDEL
8 h 40 m
no fares
BHX · 146 km
8 h 25 m
no fares
CDG · 22 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

MeasureCardiffParis
Official languageEnglishFrench
CurrencyPound Sterling (GBP)Euro (EUR)
SocketsG230 V, 50 HzCE230 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideLeftRight
Time zoneUTC, UTC+1 in summerUTC+1, UTC+2 in summer
Emergency number112 or 999112
Elevation41 m27 m
Main airportCardiff International Airport (CWL)15 km from centre8 non-stop destinationsCharles de Gaulle International Airport (CDG)22 km from centre277 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year8 days11 days

By the numbers

MeasureCardiffParis
City population383,5362,103,778
People per km²2,73419,960
Museums within 10 km9251
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km14
Distinct cuisines in the centre55169
Swim season, months above 21 °CNone–

Where else could you go?

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