VacationSelector

Lisbon or Sofia?

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

Your match

Lisbon
✓ Best match
68
match

Wins on beaches & swimming and places to eat with your weighting.

Sofia
56
match

Wins on 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.

LisbonSofia
Beaches & swimming. Lisbon leads by 57 points.57
LisbonSofia
Score570
Swim season months00
Beaches 10 km240
Coast distance2 km214 km
Water distance2 km
Places to eat. Lisbon leads by 16 points.16
LisbonSofia
Score8064
Restaurants within 2 km of centre2,496845
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km3128
Museums & heritage. Lisbon leads by 13 points.13
LisbonSofia
Score7057
Museums within 10 km12451
Museums within 2 km of centre5440
Share of museums within 2 km %4478
Unesco sites within 50 km31
Nightlife. Lisbon leads by 4 points.4
LisbonSofia
Score6561
Drinking venues within 4 km1,225958
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre956608
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %7863
Nightclubs within 4 km65102
Nature & day trips. Lisbon leads by 5 points.5
LisbonSofia
Score5651
Protected land share 50 km %1112
Landscape blanket share 50 km %04
Land share of disc %54100
Park area within 2 km77 hectares229 hectares
Good for families. Lisbon leads by 14 points.14
LisbonSofia
Score6955
Tourist attractions within 2 km8220
Park area within 2 km77 hectares229 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km10
Sights concentration. Lisbon leads by 9 points.9
LisbonSofia
Score6657
Notable places within 2 km169104
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Sofia leads by 25 points.25
LisbonSofia
Score7499
Price level global55.921.4
Daily budget€109€77
Year-round weather. Lisbon leads by 14 points.14
LisbonSofia
Score7864
Monthly daytime high14.9 °C to 28.4 °C3.5 °C to 28.4 °C
Monthly rainfall3 mm to 121 mm36 mm to 78 mm
Dry months43
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
Sofia
4
7
11
17
21
25
28
28
23
18
11
5
Sea temperature, °C
Lisbon
15
15
15
15
16
18
18
19
19
18
17
16
Sofia
No coastline within reach
Rainfall, mm
Lisbon
104
73
72
67
53
13
3
7
36
108
121
102
Sofia
36
36
45
52
73
78
64
56
54
56
38
41
Daylight, hours per day
Lisbon
10
11
12
13
14
15
15
14
13
11
10
10
Sofia
9
11
12
13
15
15
15
14
13
11
10
9
Sunshine, hours per day
Lisbon
5
6
7
8
10
11
12
11
8
7
5
5
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. Lisbon: 1991-2020 normals, Lisboa / Geof (1.1 km from centre). Sofia: 1991-2020 normals, Sofia Observ. (7.3 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromLisbonSofia
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
2 h 30 m
€112-185
LIS · 7 km
3 h 5 m
€70-85
1 stop
SOF · 8 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
2 h 25 m
€118-145
LIS · 7 km
2 h 45 m
€99-135
1 stop
SOF · 8 km
MadridMAD
1 h 15 m
€64-74
LIS · 7 km
3 h 20 m
€114-128
SOF · 8 km
FrankfurtFRA, HHN
2 h 50 m
€164-250
1 stop
LIS · 7 km
2 h 20 m
€130-210
1 stop
SOF · 8 km
BarcelonaBCN
1 h 50 m
€74-97
LIS · 7 km
2 h 45 m
€88-145
1 stop
SOF · 8 km
MilanMXP, BGY, LIN
2 h 35 m
€124-144
LIS · 7 km
2 h 5 m
€56-159
SOF · 8 km
ViennaVIE
3 h 25 m
€170-237
1 stop
LIS · 7 km
1 h 35 m
€74-99
SOF · 8 km
RomeFCO, CIA
2 h 50 m
€120-145
LIS · 7 km
1 h 45 m
€55-68
SOF · 8 km
MunichMUC
3 h 0 m
€222-263
1 stop
LIS · 7 km
2 h 0 m
no fares
SOF · 8 km
Tel Aviv YafoTLV
5 h 25 m
no fares
LIS · 7 km
2 h 30 m
€154-198
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

MeasureLisbonSofia
Official languagePortugueseBulgarian
CurrencyEuro (EUR)Euro (EUR)
SocketsCF230 V, 50 HzCF230 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideRightRight
Time zoneUTC, UTC+1 in summerUTC+2, UTC+3 in summer
Emergency number112112
Elevation100 m560 m
Main airportLisbon Humberto Delgado Airport (LIS)7 km from centre153 non-stop destinationsSofia Airport (SOF)8 km from centre94 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year14 days15 days

By the numbers

MeasureLisbonSofia
City population545,7961,213,134
People per km²5,4532,466
Museums within 10 km7842
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km31
Distinct cuisines in the centre10651
Swim season, months above 21 °CNone

Where else could you go?

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