VacationSelector

Los Angeles 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

Los Angeles
53
match

Wins on places to eat and year-round weather with your weighting.

Rio de Janeiro
✓ Best match
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.

Los AngelesRio de Janeiro
Beaches & swimming. Rio de Janeiro leads by 71 points.71
Los AngelesRio de Janeiro
Score29100
Beaches 25 km11
Beaches 10 km061
Swim season months012
Warmest sea temp20.2 °C
Scoring variantbeachScoreWideRing
Declared2026-08-25
Registerseed/editorial-overrides.json
Coast distance1 km
Water distance1 km
Places to eat. Los Angeles leads by 12 points.12
Los AngelesRio de Janeiro
Score6654
Restaurants within 2 km of centre1,337804
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km2216
Museums & heritage. Rio de Janeiro leads by 20 points.20
Los AngelesRio de Janeiro
Score4969
Museums within 10 km69110
Museums within 2 km of centre2351
Share of museums within 2 km %3346
Unesco sites within 50 km13
Nightlife. Rio de Janeiro leads by 3 points.3
Los AngelesRio de Janeiro
Score5457
Drinking venues within 4 km660818
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre432509
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %6562
Nightclubs within 4 km6450
Nature & day trips. Los Angeles and Rio de Janeiro are level on 62.
Los AngelesRio de Janeiro
Score6262
Protected land share 50 km %2621
Landscape blanket share 50 km %017
Land share of disc %8057
Park area within 2 km20 hectares113 hectares
Good for families. Rio de Janeiro leads by 26 points.26
Los AngelesRio de Janeiro
Score3359
Tourist attractions within 2 km1130
Park area within 2 km20 hectares113 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km21
Sights concentration. Rio de Janeiro leads by 2 points.2
Los AngelesRio de Janeiro
Score5456
Notable places within 2 km8898
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Rio de Janeiro leads by 38 points.38
Los AngelesRio de Janeiro
Score4381
Price level global10046.1
Daily budget
Year-round weather. Los Angeles leads by 2 points.2
Los AngelesRio de Janeiro
Score8785
Monthly daytime high18.6 °C to 24.7 °C24 °C to 28.4 °C
Monthly rainfall0 mm to 76 mm42 mm to 232 mm
Dry months80
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
Rio de Janeiro
28
28
28
27
25
24
24
25
25
26
26
27
Sea temperature, °C
Los Angeles
15
15
15
15
17
18
20
20
20
19
17
16
Rio de Janeiro
25
25
25
25
24
23
22
21
21
22
23
24
Rainfall, mm
Los Angeles
73
76
44
16
7
2
1
0
3
13
21
57
Rio de Janeiro
208
151
173
101
71
49
45
42
69
108
220
232
Daylight, hours per day
Los Angeles
10
11
12
13
14
14
14
13
12
11
10
10
Rio de Janeiro
13
13
12
12
11
11
11
11
12
13
13
14

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). Rio de Janeiro: 2001-2020 normals, NASA POWER reanalysis grid, no weather station within 90 km.

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromLos AngelesRio de Janeiro
Sao PauloGRU, VCP, CGH, RTE
12 h 20 m
no fares
LAX · 19 km
1 h 5 m
€113-134
GIG · 12 km
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
5 h 20 m
no fares
LAX · 19 km
9 h 45 m
€609-699
2 stops
GIG · 12 km
DallasDFW, DAL, AFW
3 h 0 m
€188-208
LAX · 19 km
10 h 35 m
no fares
GIG · 12 km
SantiagoSCL
11 h 15 m
no fares
LAX · 19 km
4 h 5 m
no fares
GIG · 12 km
AtlantaATL, PDK
4 h 20 m
€288
LAX · 19 km
9 h 40 m
no fares
GIG · 12 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
11 h 25 m
€600-640
1 stop
LAX · 19 km
11 h 30 m
€957-1014
2 stops
GIG · 12 km
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
11 h 0 m
no fares
LAX · 19 km
11 h 35 m
€996-1109
2 stops
GIG · 12 km
HoustonIAH, HOU
3 h 15 m
€173-245
LAX · 19 km
10 h 10 m
no fares
GIG · 12 km
TorontoYYZ, YHM, YTZ
4 h 45 m
no fares
LAX · 19 km
10 h 25 m
no fares
GIG · 12 km
DubaiDXB, DWC
16 h 25 m
€964-1015
LAX · 19 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

MeasureLos AngelesRio de Janeiro
Official languagePortuguese
CurrencyUS Dollar (USD)Brazilian Real (BRL)
SocketsAB120 V, 60 HzCN60 Hz
Driving sideRightRight
Time zoneUTC-8, UTC-7 in summerUTC-3
Emergency number911Police 190, ambulance 192, fire 193
Elevation106 m31 m
Main airportLos Angeles International Airport (LAX)19 km from centre180 non-stop destinationsRio de Janeiro Galeão – Tom Jobim International Airport (GIG)12 km from centre59 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year13 days14 days

By the numbers

MeasureLos AngelesRio de Janeiro
City population3,898,7476,211,223
People per km²2,9944,930
Museums within 10 km3870
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km13
Distinct cuisines in the centre4627
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 Los Angeles 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). 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. Temperature and rainfall for destinations with no weather station are from the NASA POWER 2001-2020 climatology, derived from MERRA-2. 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.