VacationSelector

Lisbon 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

Too close to call, 1 point apart

Lisbon
68
match

Wins on places to eat and good for families with your weighting.

Rio de Janeiro
69
match

Wins on beaches & swimming 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.

LisbonRio de Janeiro
Beaches & swimming. Rio de Janeiro leads by 43 points.43
LisbonRio de Janeiro
Score57100
Swim season months012
Beaches 10 km2461
Coast distance2 km1 km
Water distance2 km1 km
Places to eat. Lisbon leads by 26 points.26
LisbonRio de Janeiro
Score8054
Restaurants within 2 km of centre2,496804
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km3116
Museums & heritage. Lisbon leads by 1 points.1
LisbonRio de Janeiro
Score7069
Museums within 10 km124110
Museums within 2 km of centre5451
Share of museums within 2 km %4446
Unesco sites within 50 km33
Nightlife. Lisbon leads by 8 points.8
LisbonRio de Janeiro
Score6557
Drinking venues within 4 km1,225818
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre956509
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %7862
Nightclubs within 4 km6550
Nature & day trips. Rio de Janeiro leads by 6 points.6
LisbonRio de Janeiro
Score5662
Protected land share 50 km %1121
Landscape blanket share 50 km %017
Land share of disc %5457
Park area within 2 km77 hectares113 hectares
Good for families. Lisbon leads by 10 points.10
LisbonRio de Janeiro
Score6959
Tourist attractions within 2 km8230
Park area within 2 km77 hectares113 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km11
Sights concentration. Lisbon leads by 10 points.10
LisbonRio de Janeiro
Score6656
Notable places within 2 km16998
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Rio de Janeiro leads by 7 points.7
LisbonRio de Janeiro
Score7481
Price level global55.946.1
Daily budget€109
Year-round weather. Rio de Janeiro leads by 7 points.7
LisbonRio de Janeiro
Score7885
Monthly daytime high14.9 °C to 28.4 °C24 °C to 28.4 °C
Monthly rainfall3 mm to 121 mm42 mm to 232 mm
Dry months40
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
Lisbon
15
16
19
20
23
26
28
28
26
23
18
15
Rio de Janeiro
28
28
28
27
25
24
24
25
25
26
26
27
Sea temperature, °C
Lisbon
15
15
15
15
16
18
18
19
19
18
17
16
Rio de Janeiro
25
25
25
25
24
23
22
21
21
22
23
24
Rainfall, mm
Lisbon
104
73
72
67
53
13
3
7
36
108
121
102
Rio de Janeiro
208
151
173
101
71
49
45
42
69
108
220
232
Daylight, hours per day
Lisbon
10
11
12
13
14
15
15
14
13
11
10
10
Rio de Janeiro
13
13
12
12
11
11
11
11
12
13
13
14
Sunshine, hours per day
Lisbon
5
6
7
8
10
11
12
11
8
7
5
5
Rio de Janeiro
No sunshine record

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. Lisbon: 1991-2020 normals, Lisboa / Geof (1.1 km from centre). Rio de Janeiro: 2001-2020 normals, NASA POWER reanalysis grid, no weather station within 90 km.

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromLisbonRio de Janeiro
Sao PauloGRU, VCP, CGH, RTE
10 h 0 m
€744-1049
1 stop
LIS · 7 km
1 h 5 m
€113-134
GIG · 12 km
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
2 h 30 m
€112-185
LIS · 7 km
11 h 35 m
€996-1109
2 stops
GIG · 12 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
2 h 25 m
€118-145
LIS · 7 km
11 h 30 m
€957-1014
2 stops
GIG · 12 km
MadridMAD
1 h 15 m
€64-74
LIS · 7 km
10 h 15 m
€910-925
1 stop
GIG · 12 km
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
7 h 0 m
€621-718
1 stop
LIS · 7 km
9 h 45 m
€609-699
2 stops
GIG · 12 km
AmsterdamAMS
2 h 50 m
€167-189
LIS · 7 km
11 h 55 m
€900-974
1 stop
GIG · 12 km
BrasiliaBSB
9 h 15 m
no fares
LIS · 7 km
1 h 45 m
€190-412
SDU · 4 km
PortoOPO
1 h 0 m
€93-107
LIS · 7 km
10 h 0 m
€827-915
1 stop
GIG · 12 km
TorontoYYZ, YHM, YTZ
7 h 25 m
€480-569
2 stops
LIS · 7 km
10 h 25 m
no fares
GIG · 12 km
DubaiDXB, DWC
7 h 55 m
€421-500
2 stops
LIS · 7 km
14 h 40 m
€1,154-1306
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

MeasureLisbonRio de Janeiro
Official languagePortuguesePortuguese
CurrencyEuro (EUR)Brazilian Real (BRL)
SocketsCF230 V, 50 HzCN60 Hz
Driving sideRightRight
Time zoneUTC, UTC+1 in summerUTC-3
Emergency number112Police 190, ambulance 192, fire 193
Elevation100 m31 m
Main airportLisbon Humberto Delgado Airport (LIS)7 km from centre153 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

MeasureLisbonRio de Janeiro
City population545,7966,211,223
People per km²5,4534,930
Museums within 10 km7870
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km33
Distinct cuisines in the centre10627
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 Lisbon 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). 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. 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.