VacationSelector

Cologne or Lisbon?

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

Your match

Cologne
57
match

Wins on nature & day trips and good for families with your weighting.

Lisbon
✓ Best match
68
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.

CologneLisbon
Beaches & swimming. Lisbon leads by 57 points.57
CologneLisbon
Score057
Swim season months00
Beaches 10 km4024
Coast distance256 km2 km
Water distance2 km
Places to eat. Lisbon leads by 8 points.8
CologneLisbon
Score7280
Restaurants within 2 km of centre1,1422,496
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km3531
Museums & heritage. Lisbon leads by 10 points.10
CologneLisbon
Score6070
Museums within 10 km47124
Museums within 2 km of centre2754
Share of museums within 2 km %5744
Unesco sites within 50 km33
Nightlife. Lisbon leads by 1 points.1
CologneLisbon
Score6465
Drinking venues within 4 km1,1071,225
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre727956
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %6678
Nightclubs within 4 km9065
Nature & day trips. Cologne leads by 15 points.15
CologneLisbon
Score7156
Protected land share 50 km %5311
Landscape blanket share 50 km %520
Land share of disc %10054
Park area within 2 km118 hectares77 hectares
Good for families. Cologne leads by 3 points.3
CologneLisbon
Score7269
Tourist attractions within 2 km4382
Park area within 2 km118 hectares77 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km61
Sights concentration. Lisbon leads by 13 points.13
CologneLisbon
Score5366
Notable places within 2 km81169
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Lisbon leads by 14 points.14
CologneLisbon
Score6074
Price level global75.955.9
Daily budget€163€109
Year-round weather. Lisbon leads by 18 points.18
CologneLisbon
Score6078
Monthly daytime high6.3 °C to 25 °C14.9 °C to 28.4 °C
Monthly rainfall48 mm to 81 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
Cologne
6
7
12
16
20
23
25
25
21
15
10
7
Lisbon
15
16
19
20
23
26
28
28
26
23
18
15
Sea temperature, °C
Cologne
No coastline within reach
Lisbon
15
15
15
15
16
18
18
19
19
18
17
16
Rainfall, mm
Cologne
64
56
53
48
60
76
81
81
67
65
68
72
Lisbon
104
73
72
67
53
13
3
7
36
108
121
102
Daylight, hours per day
Cologne
9
10
12
14
16
16
16
15
13
11
9
8
Lisbon
10
11
12
13
14
15
15
14
13
11
10
10
Sunshine, hours per day
Cologne
2
2
4
6
7
7
7
6
5
3
2
1
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. Cologne: 1991-2020 normals, Köln-Stammheim (5.4 km from centre). Lisbon: 1991-2020 normals, Lisboa / Geof (1.1 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromCologneLisbon
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
1 h 20 m
no fares
CGN · 15 km
2 h 30 m
€112-185
LIS · 7 km
IstanbulIST, SAW
3 h 0 m
€145-156
CGN · 15 km
4 h 25 m
€212-255
LIS · 7 km
PalmaPMI
2 h 10 m
no fares
CGN · 15 km
1 h 50 m
no fares
LIS · 7 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
1 h 10 m
no fares
DUS · 41 km
2 h 25 m
€118-145
LIS · 7 km
BarcelonaBCN
2 h 0 m
€77-159
CGN · 15 km
1 h 50 m
€74-97
LIS · 7 km
MunichMUC
1 h 10 m
no fares
CGN · 15 km
3 h 0 m
€222-263
1 stop
LIS · 7 km
MadridMAD
2 h 20 m
no fares
DUS · 41 km
1 h 15 m
€64-74
LIS · 7 km
MilanMXP, BGY, LIN
1 h 20 m
€81-121
CGN · 15 km
2 h 35 m
€124-144
LIS · 7 km
ViennaVIE
1 h 35 m
€126-182
CGN · 15 km
3 h 25 m
€170-237
1 stop
LIS · 7 km
FunchalFNC
4 h 0 m
no fares
DUS · 41 km
1 h 50 m
€132-180
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 2026-10, 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

MeasureCologneLisbon
Official languageGermanPortuguese
CurrencyEuro (EUR)Euro (EUR)
SocketsCF230 V, 50 HzCF230 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideRightRight
Time zoneUTC+1, UTC+2 in summerUTC, UTC+1 in summer
Emergency number112112
Elevation59 m100 m
Main airportCologne Bonn Airport (CGN)15 km from centre113 non-stop destinationsLisbon Humberto Delgado Airport (LIS)7 km from centre153 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year11 days14 days

By the numbers

MeasureCologneLisbon
City population1,024,621545,796
People per km²2,5305,453
Museums within 10 km4078
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km33
Distinct cuisines in the centre84106
Swim season, months above 21 °CNone

Where else could you go?

Every comparison below shares a destination with this one, so you can follow Cologne 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. 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.