VacationSelector

Cologne or Lima?

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

Your match

Too close to call, 2 points apart

Cologne
57
match

Wins on nature & day trips and places to eat with your weighting.

Lima
55
match

Wins on beaches & swimming and year-round weather 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.

CologneLima
Beaches & swimming. Lima leads by 37 points.37
CologneLima
Score037
Swim season months02
Beaches 10 km4012
Coast distance256 km6 km
Water distance6 km
Places to eat. Cologne leads by 20 points.20
CologneLima
Score7252
Restaurants within 2 km of centre1,142796
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km3514
Museums & heritage. Lima leads by 4 points.4
CologneLima
Score6064
Museums within 10 km4789
Museums within 2 km of centre2747
Share of museums within 2 km %5753
Unesco sites within 50 km32
Nightlife. Cologne leads by 19 points.19
CologneLima
Score6445
Drinking venues within 4 km1,107409
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre727177
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %6643
Nightclubs within 4 km9063
Nature & day trips. Cologne leads by 44 points.44
CologneLima
Score7127
Protected land share 50 km %532
Landscape blanket share 50 km %520
Land share of disc %10051
Park area within 2 km118 hectares54 hectares
Good for families. Cologne leads by 16 points.16
CologneLima
Score7256
Tourist attractions within 2 km4325
Park area within 2 km118 hectares54 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km64
Sights concentration. Cologne leads by 7 points.7
CologneLima
Score5346
Notable places within 2 km8154
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Lima leads by 20 points.20
CologneLima
Score6080
Price level global75.947.7
Daily budget€163
Year-round weather. Lima leads by 32 points.32
CologneLima
Score6092
Monthly daytime high6.3 °C to 25 °C18.6 °C to 27.4 °C
Monthly rainfall48 mm to 81 mm0 mm to 1 mm
Dry months012
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
Cologne
6
7
12
16
20
23
25
25
21
15
10
7
Lima
26
27
27
25
22
20
19
19
19
20
22
24
Sea temperature, °C
Cologne
No coastline within reach
Lima
21
22
21
20
19
18
18
17
17
17
18
19
Rainfall, mm
Cologne
64
56
53
48
60
76
81
81
67
65
68
72
Lima
1
1
0
0
1
1
1
1
1
1
0
1
Daylight, hours per day
Cologne
9
10
12
14
16
16
16
15
13
11
9
8
Lima
13
13
12
12
12
11
12
12
12
12
13
13
Sunshine, hours per day
Cologne
2
2
4
6
7
7
7
6
5
3
2
1
Lima
5
5
6
6
3
1
1
1
1
2
3
4

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. Cologne: 1991-2020 normals, Köln-Stammheim (5.4 km from centre). Lima: 1991-2020 normals, Lima-Callao / Aerop. Internacional Jorgechavez (10.9 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromCologneLima
BarcelonaBCN
2 h 0 m
€77-159
CGN · 15 km
12 h 25 m
€898-998
1 stop
LIM · 9 km
MadridMAD
2 h 20 m
no fares
DUS · 41 km
11 h 50 m
€895-903
LIM · 9 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
1 h 10 m
no fares
DUS · 41 km
12 h 45 m
no fares
LIM · 9 km
AmsterdamAMS
55 m
no fares
DUS · 41 km
13 h 5 m
€876-946
1 stop
LIM · 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 2026-08 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

MeasureCologneLima
Official languageGermanSpanish, Aymara, Quechua
CurrencyEuro (EUR)Sol (PEN)
SocketsCF230 V, 50 HzABC220 V, 60 Hz
Driving sideRightRight
Time zoneUTC+1, UTC+2 in summerUTC-5
Emergency number112111 or 911
Elevation59 m154 m
Main airportCologne Bonn Airport (CGN)15 km from centre113 non-stop destinationsJorge Chávez International Airport (LIM)9 km from centre63 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year11 days14 days

By the numbers

MeasureCologneLima
City population1,024,6219,943,800
People per km²2,5303,721
Museums within 10 km4046
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km32
Distinct cuisines in the centre8433
Swim season, months above 21 °C2 months

Where else could you go?

Every comparison below shares a destination with this one, so you can follow Cologne or Lima 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. Airport data from OurAirports (public domain). Tourism statistics from Eurostat, © European Union, reused under CC BY 4.0. 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. Sea surface temperature from NOAA OISST v2.1, NOAA Physical Sciences Laboratory. 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. Exchange rates via Frankfurter, based on European Central Bank reference rates.

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.