VacationSelector

Glasgow or Rio de Janeiro?

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

Your match

Glasgow
48
match

Wins on places to eat and nightlife with your weighting.

Rio de Janeiro
✓ Best match
69
match

Wins on beaches & swimming and year-round weather 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.

GlasgowRio de Janeiro
Beaches & swimming. Rio de Janeiro leads by 64 points.64
GlasgowRio de Janeiro
Score36100
Swim season months012
Beaches 10 km361
Coast distance3 km1 km
Water distance3 km1 km
Places to eat. Glasgow leads by 9 points.9
GlasgowRio de Janeiro
Score6354
Restaurants within 2 km of centre740804
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km2916
Museums & heritage. Rio de Janeiro leads by 24 points.24
GlasgowRio de Janeiro
Score4569
Museums within 10 km32110
Museums within 2 km of centre1351
Share of museums within 2 km %4146
Unesco sites within 50 km23
Nightlife. Glasgow leads by 6 points.6
GlasgowRio de Janeiro
Score6357
Drinking venues within 4 km1,078818
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre654509
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %6162
Nightclubs within 4 km7350
Nature & day trips. Rio de Janeiro leads by 24 points.24
GlasgowRio de Janeiro
Score3862
Protected land share 50 km %1621
Landscape blanket share 50 km %1217
Land share of disc %9157
Park area within 2 km56 hectares113 hectares
Good for families. Rio de Janeiro leads by 18 points.18
GlasgowRio de Janeiro
Score4159
Tourist attractions within 2 km1330
Park area within 2 km56 hectares113 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km11
Sights concentration. Rio de Janeiro leads by 3 points.3
GlasgowRio de Janeiro
Score5356
Notable places within 2 km8098
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Rio de Janeiro leads by 27 points.27
GlasgowRio de Janeiro
Score5481
Price level global84.946.1
Daily budget
Year-round weather. Rio de Janeiro leads by 42 points.42
GlasgowRio de Janeiro
Score4385
Monthly daytime high6.6 °C to 18.9 °C24 °C to 28.4 °C
Monthly rainfall102 mm to 207 mm42 mm to 232 mm
Dry months00
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
Glasgow
7
7
9
12
15
18
19
19
16
13
9
7
Rio de Janeiro
28
28
28
27
25
24
24
25
25
26
26
27
Sea temperature, °C
Glasgow
8
7
7
8
10
13
15
15
14
12
11
9
Rio de Janeiro
25
25
25
25
24
23
22
21
21
22
23
24
Rainfall, mm
Glasgow
207
170
147
102
103
111
129
145
132
185
190
205
Rio de Janeiro
208
151
173
101
71
49
45
42
69
108
220
232
Daylight, hours per day
Glasgow
8
10
12
14
16
18
17
15
13
11
8
7
Rio de Janeiro
13
13
12
12
11
11
11
11
12
13
13
14
Sunshine, hours per day
Glasgow
1
2
3
4
5
4
4
4
3
2
2
1
Rio de Janeiro
No sunshine record

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. Glasgow: 1991-2020 normals, Glasgow Airport (11.5 km from centre). Rio de Janeiro: 2001-2020 normals, NASA POWER reanalysis grid, no weather station within 90 km.

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromGlasgowRio de Janeiro
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
1 h 20 m
€38-45
GLA · 11 km
11 h 35 m
€996-1109
2 stops
GIG · 12 km
TorontoYYZ, YHM, YTZ
6 h 55 m
no fares
GLA · 11 km
10 h 25 m
no fares
GIG · 12 km
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
6 h 45 m
no fares
GLA · 11 km
9 h 45 m
€609-699
2 stops
GIG · 12 km
AmsterdamAMS
1 h 30 m
no fares
GLA · 11 km
11 h 55 m
€900-974
1 stop
GIG · 12 km
RomeFCO, CIA
3 h 0 m
no fares
GLA · 11 km
11 h 25 m
€897-908
GIG · 12 km
FrankfurtFRA, HHN
1 h 55 m
no fares
GLA · 11 km
11 h 55 m
€915-1205
2 stops
GIG · 12 km
DubaiDXB, DWC
7 h 30 m
no fares
GLA · 11 km
14 h 40 m
€1,154-1306
GIG · 12 km
MadridMAD
2 h 40 m
no fares
EDI · 56 km
10 h 15 m
€910-925
1 stop
GIG · 12 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
1 h 45 m
no fares
GLA · 11 km
11 h 30 m
€957-1014
2 stops
GIG · 12 km
LisbonLIS
2 h 55 m
no fares
GLA · 11 km
9 h 45 m
€821-922
GIG · 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

MeasureGlasgowRio de Janeiro
Official languageEnglishPortuguese
CurrencyPound Sterling (GBP)Brazilian Real (BRL)
SocketsG230 V, 50 HzCN60 Hz
Driving sideLeftRight
Time zoneUTC, UTC+1 in summerUTC-3
Emergency number112 or 999Police 190, ambulance 192, fire 193
Elevation21 m31 m
Main airportGlasgow Airport (GLA)11 km from centre95 non-stop destinationsRio de Janeiro Galeão – Tom Jobim International Airport (GIG)12 km from centre59 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year10 days14 days

By the numbers

MeasureGlasgowRio de Janeiro
City population626,4106,211,223
People per km²1904,930
Museums within 10 km2970
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km23
Distinct cuisines in the centre5427
Swim season, months above 21 °CNone12 months

Where else could you go?

Every comparison below shares a destination with this one, so you can follow Glasgow or Rio de Janeiro 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. Ground elevations sampled from the Mapzen terrain tiles via OpenTopoData, merging SRTM, ASTER, NED, EU-DEM and national sources. 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). 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. Temperature and rainfall for destinations with no weather station are from the NASA POWER 2001-2020 climatology, derived from MERRA-2. 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.