VacationSelector

Los Angeles or Portland?

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

Your match

Los Angeles
✓ Best match
53
match

Wins on beaches & swimming and nature & day trips with your weighting.

Portland
42
match

Wins on places to eat and nightlife 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.

Los AngelesPortland
Beaches & swimming. Los Angeles leads by 29 points.29
Los AngelesPortland
Score290
Beaches 25 km11
Beaches 10 km027
Swim season months00
Warmest sea temp20.2 °C
Scoring variantbeachScoreWideRing
Declared2026-08-25
Registerseed/editorial-overrides.json
Coast distance69 km
Water distance
Places to eat. Portland leads by 8 points.8
Los AngelesPortland
Score6674
Restaurants within 2 km of centre1,3371,011
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km2244
Museums & heritage. Los Angeles leads by 14 points.14
Los AngelesPortland
Score4935
Museums within 10 km6923
Museums within 2 km of centre2315
Share of museums within 2 km %3365
Unesco sites within 50 km10
Nightlife. Portland leads by 4 points.4
Los AngelesPortland
Score5458
Drinking venues within 4 km660942
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre432518
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %6555
Nightclubs within 4 km6432
Nature & day trips. Los Angeles leads by 27 points.27
Los AngelesPortland
Score6235
Protected land share 50 km %2613
Landscape blanket share 50 km %03
Land share of disc %80100
Park area within 2 km20 hectares37 hectares
Good for families. Portland leads by 1 points.1
Los AngelesPortland
Score3334
Tourist attractions within 2 km118
Park area within 2 km20 hectares37 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km22
Sights concentration. Los Angeles leads by 19 points.19
Los AngelesPortland
Score5435
Notable places within 2 km8829
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Los Angeles and Portland are level on 43.
Los AngelesPortland
Score4343
Price level global100100
Daily budget
Year-round weather. Los Angeles leads by 22 points.22
Los AngelesPortland
Score8765
Monthly daytime high18.6 °C to 24.7 °C7.9 °C to 27.7 °C
Monthly rainfall0 mm to 76 mm13 mm to 145 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
Los Angeles
19
19
19
20
21
22
24
25
25
24
22
19
Portland
8
11
13
16
20
23
27
28
25
18
12
8
Sea temperature, °C
Los Angeles
15
15
15
15
17
18
20
20
20
19
17
16
Portland
No coastline within reach
Rainfall, mm
Los Angeles
73
76
44
16
7
2
1
0
3
13
21
57
Portland
128
94
101
75
65
41
13
14
39
87
138
145
Daylight, hours per day
Los Angeles
10
11
12
13
14
14
14
13
12
11
10
10
Portland
9
10
12
14
15
16
15
14
13
11
10
9

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. Los Angeles: 1991-2020 normals, Los Angeles Airport (18.5 km from centre). Portland: 1991-2020 normals, Portland International Airport (9.8 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromLos AngelesPortland
PhoenixPHX, AZA
1 h 20 m
no fares
LAX · 19 km
2 h 35 m
no fares
PDX · 10 km
San FranciscoSFO
1 h 20 m
no fares
LAX · 19 km
1 h 45 m
no fares
PDX · 10 km
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
5 h 20 m
no fares
LAX · 19 km
5 h 20 m
no fares
PDX · 10 km
Las VegasLAS
1 h 5 m
no fares
LAX · 19 km
2 h 5 m
€173-370
PDX · 10 km
SeattleSEA, BFI
2 h 30 m
no fares
LAX · 19 km
55 m
no fares
PDX · 10 km
DenverDEN, APA
2 h 20 m
no fares
LAX · 19 km
2 h 30 m
€167-182
PDX · 10 km
ChicagoORD, MDW, DPA, PWK +1
4 h 0 m
no fares
LAX · 19 km
3 h 55 m
no fares
PDX · 10 km
Salt Lake CitySLC
1 h 45 m
no fares
LAX · 19 km
1 h 50 m
no fares
PDX · 10 km
GuadalajaraGDL
3 h 10 m
no fares
LAX · 19 km
4 h 35 m
no fares
PDX · 10 km
FrankfurtFRA, HHN
11 h 40 m
no fares
LAX · 19 km
10 h 30 m
no fares
PDX · 10 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 2026-09, 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

MeasureLos AngelesPortland
CurrencyUS Dollar (USD)US Dollar (USD)
SocketsAB120 V, 60 HzAB120 V, 60 Hz
Driving sideRightRight
Time zoneUTC-8, UTC-7 in summerUTC-8, UTC-7 in summer
Emergency number911911
Elevation106 m152 m
Main airportLos Angeles International Airport (LAX)19 km from centre180 non-stop destinationsPortland International Airport (PDX)10 km from centre87 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year13 days12 days

By the numbers

MeasureLos AngelesPortland
City population3,898,747652,503
People per km²2,9941,736
Museums within 10 km3817
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km10
Distinct cuisines in the centre4682
Swim season, months above 21 °CNone

Where else could you go?

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

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.