VacationSelector

Galway or Valencia?

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 nature & day trips with your weighting.

Valencia
✓ Best match
64
match

Wins on nightlife and places to eat 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.

GalwayValencia
Beaches & swimming. Valencia leads by 16 points.16
GalwayValencia
Score5167
Swim season months05
Beaches 10 km1312
Coast distance1 km3 km
Water distance1 km3 km
Places to eat. Valencia leads by 41 points.41
GalwayValencia
Score3778
Restaurants within 2 km of centre1731,995
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km2033
Museums & heritage. Valencia leads by 35 points.35
GalwayValencia
Score2055
Museums within 10 km559
Museums within 2 km of centre526
Share of museums within 2 km %10044
Unesco sites within 50 km02
Nightlife. Valencia leads by 44 points.44
GalwayValencia
Score2670
Drinking venues within 4 km1851,513
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre153957
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %8363
Nightclubs within 4 km8108
Nature & day trips. Galway leads by 2 points.2
GalwayValencia
Score5553
Protected land share 50 km %10
Landscape blanket share 50 km %00
Land share of disc %8564
Park area within 2 km65 hectares119 hectares
Good for families. Valencia leads by 17 points.17
GalwayValencia
Score2542
Tourist attractions within 2 km512
Park area within 2 km65 hectares119 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km00
Sights concentration. Valencia leads by 30 points.30
GalwayValencia
Score2252
Notable places within 2 km1478
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Valencia leads by 14 points.14
GalwayValencia
Score5771
Price level global80.260.8
Daily budget€187€122
Year-round weather. Valencia leads by 30 points.30
GalwayValencia
Score5484
Monthly daytime high8.9 °C to 19.6 °C16.8 °C to 30.6 °C
Monthly rainfall63 mm to 113 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
Galway
9
10
11
14
16
19
20
19
18
14
11
9
Valencia
17
17
19
21
24
28
30
31
28
25
20
17
Sea temperature, °C
Galway
9
9
9
10
12
14
16
16
15
14
12
10
Valencia
14
14
14
16
18
22
25
26
25
22
19
16
Rainfall, mm
Galway
100
87
76
63
63
72
76
89
77
101
104
113
Valencia
38
30
40
33
36
26
7
15
70
66
52
48
Daylight, hours per day
Galway
8
10
12
14
16
17
16
15
13
11
9
8
Valencia
10
11
12
13
14
15
15
14
13
11
10
9
Sunshine, hours per day
Galway
2
2
4
5
6
5
4
5
4
3
2
2
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. Galway: 1991-2020 normals, Shannon Airport (64.2 km from centre). Valencia: 1991-2020 normals, Valencia (1.6 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromGalwayValencia
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
1 h 20 m
no fares
SNN · 64 km
2 h 15 m
€80-167
VLC · 9 km
PalmaPMI
2 h 40 m
no fares
SNN · 64 km
1 h 0 m
€32-53
VLC · 9 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
1 h 45 m
no fares
SNN · 64 km
1 h 55 m
€103-131
VLC · 9 km
DublinDUB
1 h 0 m
no fares
KIR · 125 km
2 h 35 m
no fares
VLC · 9 km
MilanMXP, BGY, LIN
2 h 30 m
no fares
NOC · 73 km
1 h 50 m
€51-87
VLC · 9 km
RomeFCO, CIA
3 h 0 m
no fares
SNN · 64 km
2 h 0 m
€70-117
VLC · 9 km
MalagaAGP
2 h 50 m
no fares
SNN · 64 km
1 h 15 m
€46-48
VLC · 9 km
KrakowKRK
3 h 0 m
no fares
SNN · 64 km
3 h 0 m
€105-121
VLC · 9 km
FrankfurtFRA, HHN
2 h 10 m
no fares
KIR · 125 km
2 h 15 m
€128-199
1 stop
VLC · 9 km
MadridMAD
2 h 20 m
no fares
SNN · 64 km
1 h 0 m
€69-81
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 2026-08 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

MeasureGalwayValencia
Official languageEnglish, IrishSpanish
CurrencyEuro (EUR)Euro (EUR)
SocketsG230 V, 50 HzCF230 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideLeftRight
Time zoneUTC, UTC+1 in summerUTC+1, UTC+2 in summer
Emergency number112112
Elevation25 m15 m
Main airportShannon Airport (SNN)64 km from centre36 non-stop destinationsValencia Airport (VLC)9 km from centre107 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year11 days13 days

By the numbers

MeasureGalwayValencia
City population83,456840,792
People per km²1,5636,242
Museums within 10 km446
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km02
Distinct cuisines in the centre2592
Swim season, months above 21 °CNone5 months

Where else could you go?

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