VacationSelector

Lyon or Paphos?

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 places to eat and sights concentration with your weighting.

Paphos
46
match

Wins on beaches & swimming and year-round weather 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.

LyonPaphos
Beaches & swimming. Paphos leads by 79 points.79
LyonPaphos
Score079
Swim season months06
Beaches 10 km2627
Coast distance253 km1 km
Water distance1 km
Places to eat. Lyon leads by 35 points.35
LyonPaphos
Score7944
Restaurants within 2 km of centre1,691251
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km4022
Museums & heritage. Lyon leads by 33 points.33
LyonPaphos
Score5522
Museums within 10 km538
Museums within 2 km of centre253
Share of museums within 2 km %4738
Unesco sites within 50 km22
Nightlife. Lyon leads by 28 points.28
LyonPaphos
Score5830
Drinking venues within 4 km866224
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre611161
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %7172
Nightclubs within 4 km4711
Nature & day trips. Lyon leads by 10 points.10
LyonPaphos
Score3323
Protected land share 50 km %62
Landscape blanket share 50 km %60
Land share of disc %10033
Park area within 2 km120 hectares27 hectares
Good for families. Lyon leads by 17 points.17
LyonPaphos
Score5942
Tourist attractions within 2 km2530
Park area within 2 km120 hectares27 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km20
Sights concentration. Lyon leads by 35 points.35
LyonPaphos
Score5419
Notable places within 2 km8612
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Paphos leads by 8 points.8
LyonPaphos
Score6270
Price level global73.761.4
Daily budget€160€129
Year-round weather. Paphos leads by 22 points.22
LyonPaphos
Score6486
Monthly daytime high7 °C to 28 °C17 °C to 30.8 °C
Monthly rainfall43 mm to 101 mm0 mm to 98 mm
Dry months08
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
Lyon
7
9
14
17
21
26
28
28
23
18
11
8
Paphos
17
17
19
21
25
28
30
31
29
27
23
19
Sea temperature, °C
Lyon
No coastline within reach
Paphos
17
17
17
18
21
24
27
28
27
25
22
19
Rainfall, mm
Lyon
51
43
50
68
82
73
66
68
84
101
88
54
Paphos
81
47
29
17
10
2
1
0
5
14
42
98
Daylight, hours per day
Lyon
9
10
12
14
15
16
15
14
13
11
10
9
Paphos
10
11
12
13
14
14
14
14
12
11
10
10
Sunshine, hours per day
Lyon
2
3
6
6
7
9
9
8
6
4
3
2
Paphos
No sunshine record

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. Lyon: 1991-2020 normals, Lyon / Bron (10.6 km from centre). Paphos: 1991-2020 normals, Paphos Airport (8.4 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromLyonPaphos
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
1 h 35 m
no fares
LYS · 20 km
4 h 25 m
€125-167
PFO · 8 km
ManchesterMAN
1 h 55 m
no fares
GNB · 59 km
4 h 40 m
no fares
PFO · 8 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
1 h 10 m
no fares
LYS · 20 km
4 h 5 m
€197-331
1 stop
PFO · 8 km
Tel Aviv YafoTLV
4 h 5 m
no fares
GNB · 59 km
1 h 5 m
€149-173
PFO · 8 km
IstanbulIST, SAW
3 h 0 m
€167-217
LYS · 20 km
1 h 35 m
no fares
ECN · 107 km
AmsterdamAMS
1 h 30 m
no fares
LYS · 20 km
4 h 5 m
€253-340
1 stop
PFO · 8 km
BordeauxBOD
1 h 15 m
no fares
LYS · 20 km
4 h 15 m
no fares
PFO · 8 km
AthensATH
2 h 45 m
no fares
LYS · 20 km
1 h 40 m
no fares
PFO · 8 km
RomeFCO, CIA
1 h 30 m
€79-99
LYS · 20 km
2 h 55 m
no fares
PFO · 8 km
FrankfurtFRA, HHN
1 h 20 m
€195-211
2 stops
LYS · 20 km
3 h 45 m
no fares
LCA · 110 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

MeasureLyonPaphos
Official languageFrenchTurkish, Greek, Modern Greek
CurrencyEuro (EUR)Euro (EUR)
SocketsCE230 V, 50 HzG240 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideRightLeft
Time zoneUTC+1, UTC+2 in summerUTC+2, UTC+3 in summer
Emergency number112112
Elevation160 m72 m
Main airportLyon Saint-Exupéry Airport (LYS)20 km from centre139 non-stop destinationsPaphos International Airport (PFO)8 km from centre57 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year11 days17 days

By the numbers

MeasureLyonPaphos
City population519,12735,961
People per km²10,8381,987
Museums within 10 km424
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km22
Distinct cuisines in the centre14836
Swim season, months above 21 °C6 months

Where else could you go?

Every comparison below shares a destination with this one, so you can follow Lyon or Paphos 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. 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.