VacationSelector

Limassol or Sofia?

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

Your match

Limassol
46
match

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

Sofia
✓ Best match
56
match

Wins on sights concentration and good for families 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.

LimassolSofia
Beaches & swimming. Limassol leads by 79 points.79
LimassolSofia
Score790
Swim season months60
Beaches 10 km270
Coast distance1 km214 km
Water distance1 km
Places to eat. Sofia leads by 21 points.21
LimassolSofia
Score4364
Restaurants within 2 km of centre298845
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km1928
Museums & heritage. Sofia leads by 13 points.13
LimassolSofia
Score4457
Museums within 10 km1751
Museums within 2 km of centre1040
Share of museums within 2 km %5978
Unesco sites within 50 km31
Nightlife. Sofia leads by 22 points.22
LimassolSofia
Score3961
Drinking venues within 4 km340958
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre256608
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %7563
Nightclubs within 4 km20102
Nature & day trips. Sofia leads by 29 points.29
LimassolSofia
Score2251
Protected land share 50 km %212
Landscape blanket share 50 km %04
Land share of disc %49100
Park area within 2 km32 hectares229 hectares
Good for families. Sofia leads by 39 points.39
LimassolSofia
Score1655
Tourist attractions within 2 km320
Park area within 2 km32 hectares229 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km00
Sights concentration. Sofia leads by 43 points.43
LimassolSofia
Score1457
Notable places within 2 km9104
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Sofia leads by 29 points.29
LimassolSofia
Score7099
Price level global61.421.4
Daily budget€129€77
Year-round weather. Limassol leads by 21 points.21
LimassolSofia
Score8564
Monthly daytime high16.5 °C to 31.2 °C3.5 °C to 28.4 °C
Monthly rainfall0 mm to 98 mm36 mm to 78 mm
Dry months83
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
Limassol
17
17
19
22
25
29
31
31
30
27
23
19
Sofia
4
7
11
17
21
25
28
28
23
18
11
5
Sea temperature, °C
Limassol
18
17
17
18
20
23
26
27
26
25
22
20
Sofia
No coastline within reach
Rainfall, mm
Limassol
81
47
29
17
10
2
1
0
5
14
42
98
Sofia
36
36
45
52
73
78
64
56
54
56
38
41
Daylight, hours per day
Limassol
10
11
12
13
14
14
14
14
12
11
10
10
Sofia
9
11
12
13
15
15
15
14
13
11
10
9
Sunshine, hours per day
Limassol
6
6
8
9
11
12
13
12
10
9
7
6
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. Limassol: 1998-2020 (sunshine 1991-2020, rainfall 1991-2020) normals, Akrotiri (11.6 km from centre). Sofia: 1991-2020 normals, Sofia Observ. (7.3 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromLimassolSofia
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
4 h 25 m
€125-167
PFO · 51 km
3 h 5 m
€70-85
1 stop
SOF · 8 km
Tel Aviv YafoTLV
1 h 5 m
€149-173
PFO · 51 km
2 h 30 m
€154-198
SOF · 8 km
ManchesterMAN
4 h 40 m
no fares
PFO · 51 km
3 h 15 m
no fares
SOF · 8 km
ViennaVIE
3 h 0 m
€206-323
1 stop
PFO · 51 km
1 h 35 m
€74-99
SOF · 8 km
FrankfurtFRA, HHN
3 h 45 m
no fares
LCA · 58 km
2 h 20 m
€130-210
1 stop
SOF · 8 km
MilanMXP, BGY, LIN
3 h 25 m
€125-152
1 stop
PFO · 51 km
2 h 5 m
€56-159
SOF · 8 km
AthensATH
1 h 40 m
no fares
PFO · 51 km
1 h 15 m
€113-165
1 stop
SOF · 8 km
RomeFCO, CIA
2 h 55 m
no fares
PFO · 51 km
1 h 45 m
€55-68
SOF · 8 km
MunichMUC
3 h 25 m
no fares
LCA · 58 km
2 h 0 m
no fares
SOF · 8 km
IstanbulIST, SAW
1 h 35 m
no fares
ECN · 68 km
1 h 15 m
€116-123
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 2026-09 to 2026-09, 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

MeasureLimassolSofia
Official languageTurkish, Greek, Modern GreekBulgarian
CurrencyEuro (EUR)Euro (EUR)
SocketsG240 V, 50 HzCF230 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideLeftRight
Time zoneUTC+2, UTC+3 in summerUTC+2, UTC+3 in summer
Emergency number112112
Elevation10 m560 m
Main airportLarnaca International Airport (LCA)58 km from centre109 non-stop destinationsSofia Airport (SOF)8 km from centre94 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year17 days15 days

By the numbers

MeasureLimassolSofia
City population107,9701,213,134
People per km²2,4052,466
Museums within 10 km242
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km31
Distinct cuisines in the centre2851
Swim season, months above 21 °C6 months

Where else could you go?

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