VacationSelector

Lima 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

Lima
55
match

Wins on year-round weather with your weighting.

Rio de Janeiro
✓ Best match
69
match

Wins on beaches & swimming and nature & day trips 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.

LimaRio de Janeiro
Beaches & swimming. Rio de Janeiro leads by 63 points.63
LimaRio de Janeiro
Score37100
Swim season months212
Beaches 10 km1261
Coast distance6 km1 km
Water distance6 km1 km
Places to eat. Rio de Janeiro leads by 2 points.2
LimaRio de Janeiro
Score5254
Restaurants within 2 km of centre796804
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km1416
Museums & heritage. Rio de Janeiro leads by 5 points.5
LimaRio de Janeiro
Score6469
Museums within 10 km89110
Museums within 2 km of centre4751
Share of museums within 2 km %5346
Unesco sites within 50 km23
Nightlife. Rio de Janeiro leads by 12 points.12
LimaRio de Janeiro
Score4557
Drinking venues within 4 km409818
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre177509
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %4362
Nightclubs within 4 km6350
Nature & day trips. Rio de Janeiro leads by 35 points.35
LimaRio de Janeiro
Score2762
Protected land share 50 km %221
Landscape blanket share 50 km %017
Land share of disc %5157
Park area within 2 km54 hectares113 hectares
Good for families. Rio de Janeiro leads by 3 points.3
LimaRio de Janeiro
Score5659
Tourist attractions within 2 km2530
Park area within 2 km54 hectares113 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km41
Sights concentration. Rio de Janeiro leads by 10 points.10
LimaRio de Janeiro
Score4656
Notable places within 2 km5498
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Rio de Janeiro leads by 1 points.1
LimaRio de Janeiro
Score8081
Price level global47.746.1
Daily budget
Year-round weather. Lima leads by 7 points.7
LimaRio de Janeiro
Score9285
Monthly daytime high18.6 °C to 27.4 °C24 °C to 28.4 °C
Monthly rainfall0 mm to 1 mm42 mm to 232 mm
Dry months120
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
Lima
26
27
27
25
22
20
19
19
19
20
22
24
Rio de Janeiro
28
28
28
27
25
24
24
25
25
26
26
27
Sea temperature, °C
Lima
21
22
21
20
19
18
18
17
17
17
18
19
Rio de Janeiro
25
25
25
25
24
23
22
21
21
22
23
24
Rainfall, mm
Lima
1
1
0
0
1
1
1
1
1
1
0
1
Rio de Janeiro
208
151
173
101
71
49
45
42
69
108
220
232
Daylight, hours per day
Lima
13
13
12
12
12
11
12
12
12
12
13
13
Rio de Janeiro
13
13
12
12
11
11
11
11
12
13
13
14
Sunshine, hours per day
Lima
5
5
6
6
3
1
1
1
1
2
3
4
Rio de Janeiro
No sunshine record

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. Lima: 1991-2020 normals, Lima-Callao / Aerop. Internacional Jorgechavez (10.9 km from centre). Rio de Janeiro: 2001-2020 normals, NASA POWER reanalysis grid, no weather station within 90 km.

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromLimaRio de Janeiro
Buenos AiresEZE, AEP
4 h 25 m
€256
LIM · 9 km
3 h 0 m
€212-267
GIG · 12 km
Sao PauloGRU, VCP, CGH, RTE
4 h 45 m
€282-372
LIM · 9 km
1 h 5 m
€113-134
GIG · 12 km
SantiagoSCL
3 h 35 m
€181-198
LIM · 9 km
4 h 5 m
no fares
GIG · 12 km
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
7 h 35 m
no fares
LIM · 9 km
9 h 45 m
€609-699
2 stops
GIG · 12 km
BrasiliaBSB
4 h 25 m
no fares
LIM · 9 km
1 h 45 m
€190-412
SDU · 4 km
TorontoYYZ, YHM, YTZ
8 h 0 m
no fares
LIM · 9 km
10 h 25 m
no fares
GIG · 12 km
MadridMAD
11 h 50 m
€895-903
LIM · 9 km
10 h 15 m
€910-925
1 stop
GIG · 12 km
MiamiMIA, OPF
5 h 40 m
€403-426
1 stop
LIM · 9 km
8 h 35 m
no fares
GIG · 12 km
BogotaBOG
2 h 55 m
no fares
LIM · 9 km
6 h 0 m
no fares
GIG · 12 km
AsuncionASU
3 h 40 m
no fares
LIM · 9 km
2 h 25 m
no fares
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 2026-09 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

MeasureLimaRio de Janeiro
Official languageSpanish, Aymara, QuechuaPortuguese
CurrencySol (PEN)Brazilian Real (BRL)
SocketsABC220 V, 60 HzCN60 Hz
Driving sideRightRight
Time zoneUTC-5UTC-3
Emergency number111 or 911Police 190, ambulance 192, fire 193
Elevation154 m31 m
Main airportJorge Chávez International Airport (LIM)9 km from centre63 non-stop destinationsRio de Janeiro Galeão – Tom Jobim International Airport (GIG)12 km from centre59 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year14 days14 days

By the numbers

MeasureLimaRio de Janeiro
City population9,943,8006,211,223
People per km²3,7214,930
Museums within 10 km4670
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km23
Distinct cuisines in the centre3327
Swim season, months above 21 °C2 months12 months

Where else could you go?

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