VacationSelector

Como or Montpellier?

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

Your match

Como
34
match

Wins on museums & heritage and value for money with your weighting.

Montpellier
✓ Best match
47
match

Wins on places to eat and beaches & swimming 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 Como if you want heritage and protected countryside, with UNESCO-listed places within day-trip reach and a compact centre, and you are willing to accept a short summer and a lot of rain.

Choose Montpellier if you want to eat well, swim and travel with children: a far wider restaurant range, sea at 22°C in August, theme parks within reach and a longer warm season.

Scoreboard

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

ComoMontpellier
Beaches & swimming. Montpellier leads by 32 points.32
ComoMontpellier
Score032
Swim season months02
Beaches 10 km88
Coast distance156 km9 km
Water distance—9 km
Places to eat. Montpellier leads by 40 points.40
ComoMontpellier
Score2565
Restaurants within 2 km of centre259737
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km734
Museums & heritage. Como leads by 20 points.20
ComoMontpellier
Score4626
Museums within 10 km914
Museums within 2 km of centre63
Share of museums within 2 km %6721
Unesco sites within 50 km82
Nightlife. Montpellier leads by 14 points.14
ComoMontpellier
Score2438
Drinking venues within 4 km213318
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre143265
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %6783
Nightclubs within 4 km125
Nature & day trips. Montpellier leads by 3 points.3
ComoMontpellier
Score4043
Protected land share 50 km %2315
Landscape blanket share 50 km %510
Land share of disc %10070
Park area within 2 km15 hectares55 hectares
Good for families. Montpellier leads by 29 points.29
ComoMontpellier
Score1544
Tourist attractions within 2 km68
Park area within 2 km15 hectares55 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km07
Sights concentration. Montpellier leads by 8 points.8
ComoMontpellier
Score3038
Notable places within 2 km2235
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Como leads by 6 points.6
ComoMontpellier
Score6862
Price level global64.973.7
Daily budget€155€160
Year-round weather. Montpellier leads by 16 points.16
ComoMontpellier
Score5874
Monthly daytime high7.1 °C to 27.3 °C12 °C to 29.6 °C
Monthly rainfall61 mm to 178 mm17 mm to 93 mm
Dry months05
0255075100

Where they differ

Como's strength is heritage and open country: 8 UNESCO-listed places within day-trip reach against Montpellier's 2, museums clustered tightly around the centre, and 23% of the surrounding land protected against 15%.

Montpellier has far more restaurants near the centre and a much wider range of kitchens. It has 7 theme parks within reach where Como has none, considerably more park space near the centre, and two months of sea at 21°C or more, which Como cannot match.

Where they are alike

On countryside and day trips the two are close. Each sits within reach of protected land, and in both a day spent out of the city is a realistic part of the trip.

They are also close on cost and on walkability. The national estimates behind them are similar, €155 for Italy and €160 for France, and in both the notable places sit in a compact core, though Montpellier's holds more of them.

Which traveller are you?

Travelling with children: Montpellier, clearly. 7 theme parks within reach where Como has none, considerably more park space near the centre, and a sea warm enough to swim in during the summer holidays.

Heritage-minded travellers should take Como. Its museums sit tightly around the centre, and 8 UNESCO-listed places lie within day-trip reach against Montpellier's 2, so a week can be built around excursions.

Eating and evenings out point to Montpellier: far more restaurants near the centre and a much wider range of kitchens, plus many times as many nightclubs, most of them within walking distance of the middle.

What the numbers don't tell you

The daily budget figures, €155 and €160, are national price levels for Italy and France, not measurements of Como or Montpellier. A heavily visited city can sit further from its own national average than these two figures sit from each other, so the gap tells you nothing about which trip costs more.

Montpellier's swimming rests on a narrow window: the sea is at 21°C or more for two months, and those are the months everyone else travels. Como's warmest months are also among its wettest, so a high summer temperature does not promise dry days.

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
Como
7
9
14
17
21
25
27
27
22
17
12
8
Montpellier
12
13
16
19
23
27
30
29
25
21
16
13
Sea temperature, °C
Como
No coastline within reach
Montpellier
12
12
12
14
16
19
21
22
20
18
16
14
Rainfall, mm
Como
69
61
76
138
178
172
158
158
168
150
167
80
Montpellier
56
35
39
56
46
33
17
36
88
93
78
59
Daylight, hours per day
Como
9
10
12
14
15
16
15
14
13
11
10
9
Montpellier
9
11
12
13
15
15
15
14
13
11
10
9
Sunshine, hours per day
Como
4
5
6
6
7
7
8
8
6
4
4
3
Montpellier
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
10
8
6
5
5

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. Como: 1991-2020 normals, Lugano (23 km from centre). Montpellier: 1991-2020 normals, Montpellier (7.8 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Como peaks in July and August, with highs of 27°C, but rain sits above 150mm right through the summer, so plan for interrupted afternoons. Spring is drier but noticeably cooler.

Montpellier holds up over a longer season, with highs of 23-30°C from May to September and little rain at the height of summer, 17mm in July. The sea reaches 22°C in August, so swimming is part of the trip. Autumn is the wet part of the year, near 90mm a month.

Getting there

Flying fromComoMontpellier
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
1 h 20 m
€46-63
MXP · 34 km
1 h 25 m
no fares
MPL · 8 km
MadridMAD
2 h 0 m
€63-91
MXP · 34 km
1 h 35 m
no fares
MRS · 109 km
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
1 h 45 m
€48-103
MXP · 34 km
1 h 45 m
no fares
MPL · 8 km
BordeauxBOD
1 h 35 m
no fares
MXP · 34 km
1 h 15 m
no fares
MRS · 109 km
LisbonLIS
2 h 35 m
€78-142
MXP · 34 km
2 h 10 m
€136-184
1 stop
MRS · 109 km
FrankfurtFRA, HHN
1 h 15 m
€67-76
LIN · 43 km
1 h 35 m
no fares
MRS · 109 km
MunichMUC
1 h 5 m
€96
MXP · 34 km
1 h 35 m
no fares
MRS · 109 km
TunisTUN
1 h 50 m
no fares
MXP · 34 km
1 h 40 m
no fares
MRS · 109 km
MontrealYUL, YHU, YMX
7 h 50 m
no fares
MXP · 34 km
7 h 45 m
no fares
MRS · 109 km
SeoulICN, GMP
11 h 5 m
no fares
MXP · 34 km
11 h 35 m
no fares
MRS · 109 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

MeasureComoMontpellier
Official languageItalianFrench
CurrencyEuro (EUR)Euro (EUR)
SocketsCFL230 V, 50 HzCE230 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideRightRight
Time zoneUTC+1, UTC+2 in summerUTC+1, UTC+2 in summer
Emergency number112112
Elevation201 m7 m
Main airportMilan Malpensa International Airport (MXP)34 km from centre203 non-stop destinationsMontpellier-Méditerranée Airport (MPL)8 km from centre36 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year13 days11 days

By the numbers

MeasureComoMontpellier
City population83,184310,240
People per km²2,2425,452
Museums within 10 km914
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km82
Distinct cuisines in the centre2265
Swim season, months above 21 °C–2 months

Where else could you go?

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