VacationSelector

Cologne or Valencia?

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

Valencia
✓ Best match
64
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.

CologneValencia
Beaches & swimming. Valencia leads by 67 points.67
CologneValencia
Score067
Swim season months05
Beaches 10 km4012
Coast distance256 km3 km
Water distance3 km
Places to eat. Valencia leads by 6 points.6
CologneValencia
Score7278
Restaurants within 2 km of centre1,1421,995
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km3533
Museums & heritage. Cologne leads by 5 points.5
CologneValencia
Score6055
Museums within 10 km4759
Museums within 2 km of centre2726
Share of museums within 2 km %5744
Unesco sites within 50 km32
Nightlife. Valencia leads by 6 points.6
CologneValencia
Score6470
Drinking venues within 4 km1,1071,513
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre727957
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %6663
Nightclubs within 4 km90108
Nature & day trips. Cologne leads by 18 points.18
CologneValencia
Score7153
Protected land share 50 km %5310
Landscape blanket share 50 km %520
Land share of disc %10064
Park area within 2 km118 hectares119 hectares
Good for families. Cologne leads by 30 points.30
CologneValencia
Score7242
Tourist attractions within 2 km4312
Park area within 2 km118 hectares119 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km60
Sights concentration. Cologne leads by 1 points.1
CologneValencia
Score5352
Notable places within 2 km8178
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Valencia leads by 11 points.11
CologneValencia
Score6071
Price level global75.960.8
Daily budget€163€122
Year-round weather. Valencia leads by 24 points.24
CologneValencia
Score6084
Monthly daytime high6.3 °C to 25 °C16.8 °C to 30.6 °C
Monthly rainfall48 mm to 81 mm7 mm to 70 mm
Dry months08
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
Valencia
17
17
19
21
24
28
30
31
28
25
20
17
Sea temperature, °C
Cologne
No coastline within reach
Valencia
14
14
14
16
18
22
25
26
25
22
19
16
Rainfall, mm
Cologne
64
56
53
48
60
76
81
81
67
65
68
72
Valencia
38
30
40
33
36
26
7
15
70
66
52
48
Daylight, hours per day
Cologne
9
10
12
14
16
16
16
15
13
11
9
8
Valencia
10
11
12
13
14
15
15
14
13
11
10
9
Sunshine, hours per day
Cologne
2
2
4
6
7
7
7
6
5
3
2
1
Valencia
6
6
7
8
9
9
10
10
8
7
6
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). Valencia: 1991-2020 normals, Valencia (1.6 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromCologneValencia
PalmaPMI
2 h 10 m
no fares
CGN · 15 km
1 h 0 m
€32-53
VLC · 9 km
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
1 h 20 m
no fares
CGN · 15 km
2 h 15 m
€80-167
VLC · 9 km
IstanbulIST, SAW
3 h 0 m
€145-156
CGN · 15 km
3 h 35 m
€167-378
VLC · 9 km
MilanMXP, BGY, LIN
1 h 20 m
€81-121
CGN · 15 km
1 h 50 m
€51-87
VLC · 9 km
MunichMUC
1 h 10 m
no fares
CGN · 15 km
2 h 20 m
€196-284
1 stop
VLC · 9 km
RomeFCO, CIA
1 h 55 m
no fares
CGN · 15 km
2 h 0 m
€70-117
VLC · 9 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
1 h 10 m
no fares
DUS · 41 km
1 h 55 m
€103-131
VLC · 9 km
ViennaVIE
1 h 35 m
€126-182
CGN · 15 km
2 h 40 m
€155-215
1 stop
VLC · 9 km
AmsterdamAMS
55 m
no fares
DUS · 41 km
2 h 25 m
€155-178
VLC · 9 km
HurghadaHRG
4 h 45 m
no fares
CGN · 15 km
4 h 45 m
no fares
VLC · 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 2026-10, 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

MeasureCologneValencia
Official languageGermanSpanish
CurrencyEuro (EUR)Euro (EUR)
SocketsCF230 V, 50 HzCF230 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideRightRight
Time zoneUTC+1, UTC+2 in summerUTC+1, UTC+2 in summer
Emergency number112112
Elevation59 m15 m
Main airportCologne Bonn Airport (CGN)15 km from centre113 non-stop destinationsValencia Airport (VLC)9 km from centre107 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year11 days13 days

By the numbers

MeasureCologneValencia
City population1,024,621840,792
People per km²2,5306,242
Museums within 10 km4046
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km32
Distinct cuisines in the centre8492
Swim season, months above 21 °C5 months

Where else could you go?

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