VacationSelector

Lima or Sofia?

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

Your match

Too close to call, 1 point apart

Lima
55
match

Wins on beaches & swimming and year-round weather with your weighting.

Sofia
56
match

Wins on nature & day trips and value for money 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.

LimaSofia
Beaches & swimming. Lima leads by 37 points.37
LimaSofia
Score370
Swim season months20
Beaches 10 km120
Coast distance6 km214 km
Water distance6 km
Places to eat. Sofia leads by 12 points.12
LimaSofia
Score5264
Restaurants within 2 km of centre796845
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km1428
Museums & heritage. Lima leads by 7 points.7
LimaSofia
Score6457
Museums within 10 km8951
Museums within 2 km of centre4740
Share of museums within 2 km %5378
Unesco sites within 50 km21
Nightlife. Sofia leads by 16 points.16
LimaSofia
Score4561
Drinking venues within 4 km409958
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre177608
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %4363
Nightclubs within 4 km63102
Nature & day trips. Sofia leads by 24 points.24
LimaSofia
Score2751
Protected land share 50 km %212
Landscape blanket share 50 km %04
Land share of disc %51100
Park area within 2 km54 hectares229 hectares
Good for families. Lima leads by 1 points.1
LimaSofia
Score5655
Tourist attractions within 2 km2520
Park area within 2 km54 hectares229 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km40
Sights concentration. Sofia leads by 11 points.11
LimaSofia
Score4657
Notable places within 2 km54104
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Sofia leads by 19 points.19
LimaSofia
Score8099
Price level global47.721.4
Daily budget€77
Year-round weather. Lima leads by 28 points.28
LimaSofia
Score9264
Monthly daytime high18.6 °C to 27.4 °C3.5 °C to 28.4 °C
Monthly rainfall0 mm to 1 mm36 mm to 78 mm
Dry months123
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
Sofia
4
7
11
17
21
25
28
28
23
18
11
5
Sea temperature, °C
Lima
21
22
21
20
19
18
18
17
17
17
18
19
Sofia
No coastline within reach
Rainfall, mm
Lima
1
1
0
0
1
1
1
1
1
1
0
1
Sofia
36
36
45
52
73
78
64
56
54
56
38
41
Daylight, hours per day
Lima
13
13
12
12
12
11
12
12
12
12
13
13
Sofia
9
11
12
13
15
15
15
14
13
11
10
9
Sunshine, hours per day
Lima
5
5
6
6
3
1
1
1
1
2
3
4
Sofia
3
4
6
6
8
9
10
10
7
5
3
2

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). Sofia: 1991-2020 normals, Sofia Observ. (7.3 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromLimaSofia
MadridMAD
11 h 50 m
€895-903
LIM · 9 km
3 h 20 m
€114-128
SOF · 8 km
BarcelonaBCN
12 h 25 m
€898-998
1 stop
LIM · 9 km
2 h 45 m
€88-145
1 stop
SOF · 8 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
12 h 45 m
no fares
LIM · 9 km
2 h 45 m
€99-135
1 stop
SOF · 8 km
AmsterdamAMS
13 h 5 m
€876-946
1 stop
LIM · 9 km
2 h 45 m
no fares
SOF · 8 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

MeasureLimaSofia
Official languageSpanish, Aymara, QuechuaBulgarian
CurrencySol (PEN)Euro (EUR)
SocketsABC220 V, 60 HzCF230 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideRightRight
Time zoneUTC-5UTC+2, UTC+3 in summer
Emergency number111 or 911112
Elevation154 m560 m
Main airportJorge Chávez International Airport (LIM)9 km from centre63 non-stop destinationsSofia Airport (SOF)8 km from centre94 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year14 days15 days

By the numbers

MeasureLimaSofia
City population9,943,8001,213,134
People per km²3,7212,466
Museums within 10 km4642
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km21
Distinct cuisines in the centre3351
Swim season, months above 21 °C2 months

Where else could you go?

Every comparison below shares a destination with this one, so you can follow Lima or Sofia 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. Tourism statistics from Eurostat, © European Union, reused under CC BY 4.0. 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.