VacationSelector

Gdansk or Riga?

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

Your match

Gdansk
✓ Best match
56
match

Wins on good for families and beaches & swimming with your weighting.

Riga
53
match

Wins on nightlife 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.

The verdict

Choose Gdansk if you are travelling with children or want the sea nearby: far more attractions in the centre, three theme parks within reach, and water 1km from the middle of town.

Choose Riga if your trip is built on walking, eating and evenings: a denser centre, more museums, a wider range of kitchens and far more bars and clubs within easy reach.

Scoreboard

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

GdanskRiga
Beaches & swimming. Gdansk leads by 15 points.15
GdanskRiga
Score5540
Swim season months00
Beaches 10 km2057
Coast distance1 km12 km
Water distance1 km12 km
Places to eat. Riga leads by 7 points.7
GdanskRiga
Score5259
Restaurants within 2 km of centre348470
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km2833
Museums & heritage. Riga leads by 4 points.4
GdanskRiga
Score5761
Museums within 10 km4369
Museums within 2 km of centre2847
Share of museums within 2 km %6568
Unesco sites within 50 km21
Nightlife. Riga leads by 15 points.15
GdanskRiga
Score3651
Drinking venues within 4 km269584
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre203456
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %7578
Nightclubs within 4 km3054
Nature & day trips. Gdansk leads by 1 points.1
GdanskRiga
Score4544
Protected land share 50 km %1210
Landscape blanket share 50 km %30
Land share of disc %7073
Park area within 2 km61 hectares68 hectares
Good for families. Gdansk leads by 40 points.40
GdanskRiga
Score7535
Tourist attractions within 2 km1087
Park area within 2 km61 hectares68 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km31
Sights concentration. Riga leads by 10 points.10
GdanskRiga
Score5262
Notable places within 2 km76137
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Gdansk leads by 3 points.3
GdanskRiga
Score7976
Price level global4953.7
Daily budget€133€132
Year-round weather. Gdansk and Riga are level on 52.
GdanskRiga
Score5252
Monthly daytime high0.7 °C to 22.1 °C-0.1 °C to 23.5 °C
Monthly rainfall37 mm to 87 mm33 mm to 87 mm
Dry months33
0255075100

Where they differ

Gdansk is the easier city with children: many times more tourist attractions near the centre than Riga, theme parks within reach, and the sea close enough to build a day around without leaving town.

Riga is the stronger choice for evenings out, with about twice as many places to drink and about twice as many nightclubs as Gdansk, most of them near the centre. It also has more beaches, 57 against 20, though they lie 12km out rather than at the edge of town.

Where they are alike

Weather is where the two are closest: winters near freezing, summers peaking at 22°C in Gdansk and a little higher in Riga, three months apiece at 40mm of rain or less, and a sea that reaches 19°C in August in both.

The countryside around them is much the same too. 12% of the land around Gdansk is protected against 10% around Riga, park space near each centre is comparable, and the two national daily budget estimates sit almost level.

Which traveller are you?

Travelling with children, Gdansk is the clearer pick: the concentration of attractions in the centre, theme parks within reach and a shoreline reached without much planning make short days easy to fill.

A trip built on walking, museums and evenings favours Riga: about twice as many museums as Gdansk, a denser cluster of notable places on foot, a wider range of kitchens and far more bars.

For coast and countryside, Gdansk again. The sea sits beside the centre rather than 12km out, and slightly more of the surrounding land is protected, though Riga has the greater number of beaches, 57 against 20.

What the numbers don't tell you

The daily budget figures, €133 and €132, are national estimates for Poland and Latvia, not measurements of Gdansk or Riga. Both are large, heavily visited cities, and either can sit some way from its own country's average, so the near-identical national figures tell you nothing about which trip costs more.

This dataset carries no sunshine figure for Riga: no nearby station records it, so it is missing rather than low. Riga's monthly picture rests on temperature, rainfall and sea temperature alone, which means one side of the weather comparison is simply unmeasured for it.

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
Gdansk
1
2
6
12
17
20
22
22
18
12
7
3
Riga
0
0
4
12
17
21
24
22
17
11
5
1
Sea temperature, °C
Gdansk
4
3
3
5
10
14
18
19
17
13
9
6
Riga
2
1
1
3
9
14
18
19
16
11
8
5
Rainfall, mm
Gdansk
47
37
40
37
59
68
87
78
74
71
54
55
Riga
43
40
35
33
52
69
87
78
65
82
58
50
Daylight, hours per day
Gdansk
8
10
12
14
16
17
17
15
13
11
9
7
Riga
8
9
12
14
17
18
17
15
13
10
8
7
Sunshine, hours per day
Gdansk
1
2
5
7
8
8
8
8
6
4
1
1
Riga
No sunshine record

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. Gdansk: 1991-2020 normals, Gdansk-Rebiechowo (12.7 km from centre). Riga: 1991-2020 normals, Riga (4.1 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Gdansk is the better bet either side of high summer. April is dry at 37mm with highs of 12°C, and September still holds 18°C with the sea at 17°C. October brings 71mm here against Riga's 82mm, so the autumn edge stays drier.

Riga peaks in July, with highs of 24°C against Gdansk's 22°C, though both take 87mm that month. August is drier at 78mm, and the sea in both reaches 19°C.

Getting there

Flying fromGdanskRiga
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
2 h 10 m
no fares
GDN · 13 km
2 h 40 m
no fares
RIX · 9 km
OsloOSL, TRF
1 h 35 m
no fares
GDN · 13 km
1 h 40 m
no fares
RIX · 9 km
StockholmARN, BMA, NYO, VST
1 h 20 m
no fares
GDN · 13 km
1 h 15 m
no fares
RIX · 9 km
CopenhagenCPH
1 h 10 m
no fares
GDN · 13 km
1 h 30 m
no fares
RIX · 9 km
WarsawWAW, WMI
1 h 0 m
no fares
GDN · 13 km
1 h 20 m
no fares
RIX · 9 km
AmsterdamAMS
1 h 45 m
no fares
GDN · 13 km
2 h 15 m
no fares
RIX · 9 km
FrankfurtFRA, HHN
1 h 40 m
no fares
GDN · 13 km
2 h 10 m
no fares
RIX · 9 km
HelsinkiHEL
1 h 35 m
no fares
GDN · 13 km
1 h 5 m
no fares
RIX · 9 km
AntalyaAYT
3 h 10 m
no fares
GDN · 13 km
3 h 20 m
no fares
RIX · 9 km
HurghadaHRG
4 h 30 m
no fares
GDN · 13 km
4 h 40 m
no fares
RIX · 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.

Before you go

MeasureGdanskRiga
Official languagePolishLatvian
CurrencyZloty (PLN)Euro (EUR)
SocketsCE50 HzCF230 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideRightRight
Time zoneUTC+1, UTC+2 in summerUTC+2, UTC+3 in summer
Emergency number112112
Elevation11 m6 m
Main airportGdańsk Lech Wałęsa Airport (GDN)13 km from centre65 non-stop destinationsRiga International Airport (RIX)9 km from centre101 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year14 days–

By the numbers

MeasureGdanskRiga
City population487,834588,911
People per km²714–
Museums within 10 km3712
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km21
Distinct cuisines in the centre4855
Swim season, months above 21 °CNoneNone

Where else could you go?

Every comparison below shares a destination with this one, so you can follow Gdansk or Riga 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). Exchange rates via Frankfurter, based on European Central Bank reference rates. 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.

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.