VacationSelector

Dubai or Porto?

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

Your match

Dubai
55
match

Wins on beaches & swimming with your weighting.

Porto
✓ Best match
62
match

Wins on museums & heritage and sights concentration 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.

DubaiPorto
Beaches & swimming. Dubai leads by 40 points.40
DubaiPorto
Score10060
Swim season months120
Beaches 10 km5252
Coast distance0 km4 km
Water distance0 km3 km
Places to eat. Porto leads by 2 points.2
DubaiPorto
Score6668
Restaurants within 2 km of centre1,0861,172
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km2627
Museums & heritage. Porto leads by 33 points.33
DubaiPorto
Score3871
Museums within 10 km26101
Museums within 2 km of centre1857
Share of museums within 2 km %6956
Unesco sites within 50 km03
Nightlife. Porto leads by 5 points.5
DubaiPorto
Score5358
Drinking venues within 4 km601900
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre306570
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %5163
Nightclubs within 4 km8438
Nature & day trips. Porto leads by 15 points.15
DubaiPorto
Score1833
Protected land share 50 km %47
Landscape blanket share 50 km %00
Land share of disc %5261
Park area within 2 km13 hectares30 hectares
Good for families. Porto leads by 16 points.16
DubaiPorto
Score4965
Tourist attractions within 2 km37122
Park area within 2 km13 hectares30 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km41
Sights concentration. Porto leads by 17 points.17
DubaiPorto
Score3754
Notable places within 2 km3385
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Porto leads by 5 points.5
DubaiPorto
Score6974
Price level global63.455.9
Daily budget€109
Year-round weather. Porto leads by 5 points.5
DubaiPorto
Score6671
Monthly daytime high24.5 °C to 42.1 °C13.8 °C to 25.2 °C
Monthly rainfall0 mm to 21 mm22 mm to 181 mm
Dry months123
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
Dubai
25
26
29
34
38
41
42
42
40
36
31
27
Porto
14
15
18
18
21
23
25
25
24
20
17
14
Sea temperature, °C
Dubai
23
22
23
25
29
31
33
33
33
31
28
25
Porto
14
13
14
14
16
17
17
17
17
17
16
14
Rainfall, mm
Dubai
21
6
11
7
0
0
0
0
0
0
9
18
Porto
151
97
104
99
89
35
22
33
75
158
181
173
Daylight, hours per day
Dubai
11
11
12
13
13
14
14
13
12
12
11
11
Porto
10
11
12
13
15
15
15
14
13
11
10
9
Sunshine, hours per day
Dubai
No sunshine record
Porto
5
5
7
8
9
9
10
9
8
5
5
4

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. Dubai: 1991-2020 normals, Dubai International Airport (3.3 km from centre). Porto: 1991-2020 normals, Porto / Serra Do Pilar (2.1 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromDubaiPorto
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
6 h 50 m
no fares
DXB · 7 km
2 h 5 m
€88-127
OPO · 12 km
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
7 h 10 m
€226-241
DXB · 7 km
2 h 10 m
€90-144
1 stop
OPO · 12 km
MadridMAD
7 h 20 m
no fares
DXB · 7 km
1 h 10 m
€70-124
OPO · 12 km
GenevaGVA
6 h 25 m
no fares
DXB · 7 km
2 h 10 m
€128-166
1 stop
OPO · 12 km
LisbonLIS
7 h 55 m
no fares
DXB · 7 km
1 h 0 m
€81
OPO · 12 km
ZurichZRH
6 h 15 m
€237-344
1 stop
DXB · 7 km
2 h 30 m
€195-198
OPO · 12 km
BarcelonaBCN
6 h 45 m
no fares
DXB · 7 km
1 h 45 m
€81-135
OPO · 12 km
IstanbulIST, SAW
4 h 15 m
€175-294
DXB · 7 km
4 h 20 m
€235-292
1 stop
OPO · 12 km
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
13 h 35 m
€476-487
DXB · 7 km
6 h 55 m
no fares
OPO · 12 km
Sao PauloGRU, VCP, CGH, RTE
15 h 0 m
no fares
DXB · 7 km
10 h 15 m
no fares
OPO · 12 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

MeasureDubaiPorto
Official languageArabicPortuguese
CurrencyUAE Dirham (AED)Euro (EUR)
SocketsCG220 V, 50 HzCF230 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideRightRight
Time zoneUTC+4UTC, UTC+1 in summer
Emergency number112112
Elevation0 m104 m
Main airportDubai International Airport (DXB)7 km from centre292 non-stop destinationsFrancisco de Sá Carneiro Airport (OPO)12 km from centre132 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year14 days

By the numbers

MeasureDubaiPorto
City population3,944,751231,800
People per km²5,599
Museums within 10 km1442
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km03
Distinct cuisines in the centre5270
Swim season, months above 21 °C12 monthsNone

Where else could you go?

Every comparison below shares a destination with this one, so you can follow Dubai or Porto 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). 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. Public holidays from Nager.Date (MIT). 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.