VacationSelector

Chicago or Santiago de Compostela?

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

Your match

Chicago
✓ Best match
56
match

Wins on beaches & swimming and places to eat with your weighting.

Santiago de Compostela
42
match

Wins on value for money and nature & day trips 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.

ChicagoSantiago de Compostela
Beaches & swimming. Chicago leads by 53 points.53
ChicagoSantiago de Compostela
Score530
Swim season months10
Beaches 10 km120
Coast distance10,000 km26 km
Water distance1 km26 km
Places to eat. Chicago leads by 33 points.33
ChicagoSantiago de Compostela
Score8148
Restaurants within 2 km of centre2,147336
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km3723
Museums & heritage. Chicago leads by 2 points.2
ChicagoSantiago de Compostela
Score4644
Museums within 10 km4516
Museums within 2 km of centre2014
Share of museums within 2 km %4488
Unesco sites within 50 km12
Nightlife. Chicago leads by 26 points.26
ChicagoSantiago de Compostela
Score6236
Drinking venues within 4 km1,123306
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre728268
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %6588
Nightclubs within 4 km5113
Nature & day trips. Santiago de Compostela leads by 8 points.8
ChicagoSantiago de Compostela
Score3846
Protected land share 50 km %611
Landscape blanket share 50 km %00
Land share of disc %10092
Park area within 2 km118 hectares109 hectares
Good for families. Chicago leads by 28 points.28
ChicagoSantiago de Compostela
Score5527
Tourist attractions within 2 km182
Park area within 2 km118 hectares109 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km20
Sights concentration. Chicago leads by 28 points.28
ChicagoSantiago de Compostela
Score7042
Notable places within 2 km21744
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Santiago de Compostela leads by 28 points.28
ChicagoSantiago de Compostela
Score4371
Price level global10060.8
Daily budget€122
Year-round weather. Santiago de Compostela leads by 5 points.5
ChicagoSantiago de Compostela
Score5762
Monthly daytime high0.2 °C to 29.4 °C11.3 °C to 25 °C
Monthly rainfall54 mm to 121 mm41 mm to 223 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
Chicago
0
3
9
15
22
27
29
28
25
17
10
3
Santiago de Compostela
11
13
15
17
20
23
25
25
23
19
14
12
Sea temperature, °C
Chicago
3
2
2
4
7
14
21
23
20
15
9
6
Santiago de Compostela
14
13
13
14
15
16
17
17
17
16
15
14
Rainfall, mm
Chicago
58
54
68
105
121
115
102
104
85
98
69
59
Santiago de Compostela
217
149
153
136
116
61
41
61
91
208
223
222
Daylight, hours per day
Chicago
10
11
12
13
15
15
15
14
13
11
10
9
Santiago de Compostela
9
11
12
13
15
15
15
14
13
11
10
9
Sunshine, hours per day
Chicago
No sunshine record
Santiago de Compostela
3
4
5
6
7
7
8
8
6
4
3
3

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. Chicago: 1991-2020 normals, Chicago Midway Airport (14.5 km from centre). Santiago de Compostela: 1991-2020 normals, Santiago / Labacolla (8.4 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromChicagoSantiago de Compostela
MadridMAD
8 h 35 m
no fares
ORD · 25 km
1 h 15 m
€86-122
SCQ · 10 km
BarcelonaBCN
9 h 0 m
no fares
ORD · 25 km
1 h 40 m
€71-184
SCQ · 10 km
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
8 h 10 m
no fares
ORD · 25 km
2 h 0 m
no fares
SCQ · 10 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
8 h 30 m
no fares
ORD · 25 km
1 h 55 m
no fares
SCQ · 10 km
DublinDUB
7 h 35 m
no fares
ORD · 25 km
2 h 5 m
no fares
SCQ · 10 km
MilanMXP, BGY, LIN
9 h 10 m
no fares
ORD · 25 km
2 h 20 m
no fares
SCQ · 10 km
AmsterdamAMS
8 h 25 m
no fares
ORD · 25 km
2 h 20 m
no fares
SCQ · 10 km
FrankfurtFRA, HHN
8 h 50 m
no fares
ORD · 25 km
2 h 25 m
no fares
SCQ · 10 km
ZurichZRH
9 h 5 m
no fares
ORD · 25 km
2 h 20 m
no fares
SCQ · 10 km
BrusselsBRU, CRL
8 h 30 m
no fares
ORD · 25 km
2 h 15 m
no fares
SCQ · 10 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

MeasureChicagoSantiago de Compostela
Official languageSpanish
CurrencyUS Dollar (USD)Euro (EUR)
SocketsAB120 V, 60 HzCF230 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideRightRight
Time zoneUTC-6, UTC-5 in summerUTC+1, UTC+2 in summer
Emergency number911112
Elevation179 m260 m
Main airportChicago O'Hare International Airport (ORD)25 km from centre272 non-stop destinationsSantiago-Rosalía de Castro Airport (SCQ)10 km from centre27 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year13 days13 days

By the numbers

MeasureChicagoSantiago de Compostela
City population2,746,388100,965
People per km²4,529459
Museums within 10 km436
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km12
Distinct cuisines in the centre8738
Swim season, months above 21 °C1 monthNone

Where else could you go?

Every comparison below shares a destination with this one, so you can follow Chicago or Santiago de Compostela 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.