VacationSelector

Lyon or Monaco?

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

Your match

Lyon
✓ Best match
52
match

Wins on nightlife and places to eat with your weighting.

Monaco
48
match

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

What matters to you?

Pick a travel style or drag the sliders. The match scores above update as you do.

The verdict

Choose Lyon if the trip is about eating and evenings out: many more restaurants than Monaco has and a much wider range of kitchens, plus far more bars and clubs, most of them near the centre.

Choose Monaco if you want to swim and walk. It has 50 beaches nearby, sea at 21°C or more for four months, and much more of the surrounding land under protection.

Scoreboard

Each measure scored 0 to 100. Open a row for the figures behind the score.

LyonMonaco
Beaches & swimming. Monaco leads by 73 points.73
LyonMonaco
Score073
Swim season months04
Beaches 10 km2650
Coast distance253 km0 km
Water distance—0 km
Places to eat. Lyon leads by 40 points.40
LyonMonaco
Score7939
Restaurants within 2 km of centre1,691269
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km4016
Museums & heritage. Lyon leads by 17 points.17
LyonMonaco
Score5538
Museums within 10 km5323
Museums within 2 km of centre258
Share of museums within 2 km %4735
Unesco sites within 50 km22
Nightlife. Lyon leads by 50 points.50
LyonMonaco
Score588
Drinking venues within 4 km86669
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre61163
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %7191
Nightclubs within 4 km477
Nature & day trips. Monaco leads by 20 points.20
LyonMonaco
Score3353
Protected land share 50 km %624
Landscape blanket share 50 km %617
Land share of disc %10054
Park area within 2 km120 hectares15 hectares
Good for families. Lyon leads by 24 points.24
LyonMonaco
Score5935
Tourist attractions within 2 km2514
Park area within 2 km120 hectares15 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km23
Sights concentration. Monaco leads by 10 points.10
LyonMonaco
Score5464
Notable places within 2 km86154
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for moneyNo source publishes a price level for Monaco.
Year-round weather. Monaco leads by 10 points.10
LyonMonaco
Score6474
Monthly daytime high7 °C to 28 °C13.3 °C to 27.9 °C
Monthly rainfall43 mm to 101 mm13 mm to 138 mm
Dry months03
0255075100

Where they differ

Lyon has many times as many restaurants near the centre and a much wider range of kitchens, plus many times as many bars and nightclubs. It also has about twice as many museums, twice as many tourist attractions near the centre, and far more park space.

Monaco is the one for swimming: 50 beaches nearby against Lyon's 26, and four months of sea at 21°C or more. 24% of the land around it is protected against 6% around Lyon, and twice as many notable places sit within walking distance of the centre.

Where they are alike

Summer arrives the same way in both. Each peaks at 28°C, in July in Lyon and August in Monaco, so a high-summer trip is equally warm in either, and both cool off steadily through autumn.

On heritage and layout they overlap too: each has 2 UNESCO-listed places within day-trip reach, and in both the museums, notable sights and places to drink sit close to the centre rather than scattered across the map.

Which traveller are you?

If you travel to eat and to stay out late, take Lyon: many times as many restaurants near the centre, a much wider range of kitchens, and many times as many bars and clubs, nearly all of them close in.

If the point is swimming and coastal walking, take Monaco: 50 beaches nearby, four months of sea at 21°C or more, and 24% of the surrounding land protected.

Families split. Lyon has about twice as many tourist attractions near the centre and far more park space, while Monaco counters with 3 theme parks within reach against Lyon's 2, and shorter walks between sights.

What the numbers don't tell you

There is no cost comparison to be made here. The data carries a daily budget for Lyon, about €160 a day, and none at all for Monaco, so nothing on this page tells you what the second trip costs. The two cannot be ranked on price.

Monaco's beach and sea figures describe a narrow part of the year. Sea at 21°C or more lasts four months, and those are the same months that draw the most people. Outside them, autumn rain runs to 138mm in the wettest month, and Monaco's few places to drink mean quiet evenings whatever the season.

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
Lyon
7
9
14
17
21
26
28
28
23
18
11
8
Monaco
13
14
15
17
21
25
28
28
25
21
17
14
Sea temperature, °C
Lyon
No coastline within reach
Monaco
14
13
14
15
18
21
24
25
22
20
17
15
Rainfall, mm
Lyon
51
43
50
68
82
73
66
68
84
101
88
54
Monaco
74
53
51
69
42
34
13
18
84
124
138
91
Daylight, hours per day
Lyon
9
10
12
14
15
16
15
14
13
11
10
9
Monaco
9
11
12
13
15
15
15
14
13
11
10
9
Sunshine, hours per day
Lyon
2
3
6
6
7
9
9
8
6
4
3
2
Monaco
5
6
7
7
9
10
11
11
8
6
5
5

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. Lyon: 1991-2020 normals, Lyon / Bron (10.6 km from centre). Monaco: 1991-2020 normals, Nice (19.9 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Lyon's window is June to August, with highs of 26-28°C and 66-73mm of rain a month. September stays warm but wetter, and October is its heaviest at 101mm.

Monaco is drier in high summer: July and August reach 28°C with only 13-18mm of rain and sea at 24-25°C. Its winter days stay near 13°C, milder than Lyon's, but autumn is its wettest stretch, peaking at 138mm, which makes it a poor time for the coast.

Getting there

Flying fromLyonMonaco
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
1 h 35 m
no fares
LYS · 20 km
1 h 55 m
€76-223
NCE · 18 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
1 h 10 m
no fares
LYS · 20 km
1 h 30 m
€78-111
NCE · 18 km
IstanbulIST, SAW
3 h 0 m
€167-217
LYS · 20 km
2 h 45 m
€202-329
NCE · 18 km
TunisTUN
1 h 55 m
no fares
LYS · 20 km
1 h 35 m
€148-281
NCE · 18 km
BordeauxBOD
1 h 15 m
no fares
LYS · 20 km
1 h 25 m
no fares
NCE · 18 km
RomeFCO, CIA
1 h 30 m
€79-99
LYS · 20 km
1 h 10 m
€69-133
NCE · 18 km
NantesNTE
1 h 20 m
no fares
LYS · 20 km
1 h 35 m
€129-163
NCE · 18 km
LisbonLIS
2 h 20 m
€109-165
LYS · 20 km
2 h 25 m
€153-221
1 stop
NCE · 18 km
AmsterdamAMS
1 h 30 m
no fares
LYS · 20 km
1 h 50 m
€170-248
NCE · 18 km
MontrealYUL, YHU, YMX
7 h 35 m
€446-565
1 stop
LYS · 20 km
7 h 55 m
no fares
NCE · 18 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

MeasureLyonMonaco
Official languageFrenchFrench
CurrencyEuro (EUR)Euro (EUR)
SocketsCE230 V, 50 HzCEF230 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideRightRight
Time zoneUTC+1, UTC+2 in summerUTC+1, UTC+2 in summer
Emergency number112112
Elevation160 m68 m
Main airportLyon Saint-Exupéry Airport (LYS)20 km from centre139 non-stop destinationsNice-Côte d'Azur Airport (NCE)18 km from centre129 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year11 days12 days

By the numbers

MeasureLyonMonaco
City population519,12738,857
People per km²10,83818,503
Museums within 10 km4214
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km22
Distinct cuisines in the centre14829
Swim season, months above 21 °C–4 months

Where else could you go?

Every comparison below shares a destination with this one, so you can follow Lyon or Monaco 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. 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. Ground elevations sampled from the Mapzen terrain tiles via OpenTopoData, merging SRTM, ASTER, NED, EU-DEM and national sources. Sea surface temperature from NOAA OISST v2.1, NOAA Physical Sciences Laboratory. 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.