VacationSelector

Galway or Santiago?

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

Your match

Galway
39
match

Wins on beaches & swimming and nature & day trips with your weighting.

Santiago
✓ Best match
55
match

Wins on places to eat and nightlife 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.

GalwaySantiago
Beaches & swimming. Galway leads by 51 points.51
GalwaySantiago
Score510
Swim season months00
Beaches 10 km130
Coast distance1 km89 km
Water distance1 km
Places to eat. Santiago leads by 35 points.35
GalwaySantiago
Score3772
Restaurants within 2 km of centre1731,317
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km2032
Museums & heritage. Santiago leads by 25 points.25
GalwaySantiago
Score2045
Museums within 10 km587
Museums within 2 km of centre530
Share of museums within 2 km %10034
Unesco sites within 50 km00
Nightlife. Santiago leads by 35 points.35
GalwaySantiago
Score2661
Drinking venues within 4 km185912
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre153542
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %8359
Nightclubs within 4 km8112
Nature & day trips. Galway leads by 3 points.3
GalwaySantiago
Score5552
Protected land share 50 km %17
Landscape blanket share 50 km %00
Land share of disc %85100
Park area within 2 km65 hectares88 hectares
Good for families. Santiago leads by 24 points.24
GalwaySantiago
Score2549
Tourist attractions within 2 km512
Park area within 2 km65 hectares88 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km03
Sights concentration. Santiago leads by 26 points.26
GalwaySantiago
Score2248
Notable places within 2 km1462
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Santiago leads by 24 points.24
GalwaySantiago
Score5781
Price level global80.246.2
Daily budget€187
Year-round weather. Santiago leads by 31 points.31
GalwaySantiago
Score5485
Monthly daytime high8.9 °C to 19.6 °C14.3 °C to 27.7 °C
Monthly rainfall63 mm to 113 mm0 mm to 87 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
Galway
9
10
11
14
16
19
20
19
18
14
11
9
Santiago
28
27
26
21
18
15
14
16
19
22
25
27
Sea temperature, °C
Galway
9
9
9
10
12
14
16
16
15
14
12
10
Santiago
No coastline within reach
Rainfall, mm
Galway
100
87
76
63
63
72
76
89
77
101
104
113
Santiago
0
2
5
16
46
87
52
44
27
11
6
3
Daylight, hours per day
Galway
8
10
12
14
16
17
16
15
13
11
9
8
Santiago
14
13
12
11
10
10
10
11
12
13
14
14
Sunshine, hours per day
Galway
2
2
4
5
6
5
4
5
4
3
2
2
Santiago
11
9
8
6
5
3
4
5
6
8
9
11

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. Galway: 1991-2020 normals, Shannon Airport (64.2 km from centre). Santiago: 1991-2020 normals, Santiago Q. Normal (3.1 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromGalwaySantiago
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
1 h 20 m
no fares
SNN · 64 km
14 h 25 m
no fares
SCL · 14 km
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
6 h 30 m
no fares
SNN · 64 km
10 h 20 m
no fares
SCL · 14 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
1 h 45 m
no fares
SNN · 64 km
14 h 25 m
no fares
SCL · 14 km
MadridMAD
2 h 20 m
no fares
SNN · 64 km
13 h 15 m
€799-1378
1 stop
SCL · 14 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

MeasureGalwaySantiago
Official languageEnglish, IrishSpanish
CurrencyEuro (EUR)Chilean Peso (CLP)
SocketsG230 V, 50 HzCL220 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideLeftRight
Time zoneUTC, UTC+1 in summerUTC-4, UTC-3 in summer
Emergency number112Police 133/134, ambulance 131, fire 132
Elevation25 m575 m
Main airportShannon Airport (SNN)64 km from centre36 non-stop destinationsComodoro Arturo Merino Benítez International Airport (SCL)14 km from centre68 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year11 days16 days

By the numbers

MeasureGalwaySantiago
City population83,4566,257,516
People per km²1,5637,468
Museums within 10 km454
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km00
Distinct cuisines in the centre2564
Swim season, months above 21 °CNone

Where else could you go?

Every comparison below shares a destination with this one, so you can follow Galway or Santiago 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). 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. 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.