VacationSelector

Madrid or Melbourne?

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

Your match

Madrid
✓ Best match
66
match

Wins on museums & heritage and value for money with your weighting.

Melbourne
60
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.

MadridMelbourne
Beaches & swimming. Melbourne leads by 55 points.55
MadridMelbourne
Score055
Swim season months00
Beaches 10 km419
Coast distance305 km4 km
Water distance—4 km
Places to eat. Madrid leads by 8 points.8
MadridMelbourne
Score8375
Restaurants within 2 km of centre3,5081,888
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km2829
Museums & heritage. Madrid leads by 26 points.26
MadridMelbourne
Score7549
Museums within 10 km9742
Museums within 2 km of centre5924
Share of museums within 2 km %6157
Unesco sites within 50 km41
Nightlife. Madrid leads by 7 points.7
MadridMelbourne
Score8174
Drinking venues within 4 km2,4141,921
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre1,4981,200
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %6262
Nightclubs within 4 km341124
Nature & day trips. Madrid leads by 20 points.20
MadridMelbourne
Score6343
Protected land share 50 km %196
Landscape blanket share 50 km %00
Land share of disc %10081
Park area within 2 km187 hectares166 hectares
Good for families. Madrid leads by 17 points.17
MadridMelbourne
Score7760
Tourist attractions within 2 km6126
Park area within 2 km187 hectares166 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km31
Sights concentration. Madrid leads by 18 points.18
MadridMelbourne
Score7557
Notable places within 2 km288103
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Madrid leads by 21 points.21
MadridMelbourne
Score7150
Price level global60.890.2
Daily budget€122—
Year-round weather. Melbourne leads by 4 points.4
MadridMelbourne
Score7276
Monthly daytime high10 °C to 32.7 °C13.6 °C to 26.8 °C
Monthly rainfall9 mm to 64 mm45 mm to 69 mm
Dry months70
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
Madrid
10
12
16
19
23
29
33
32
27
20
14
10
Melbourne
27
27
24
20
17
14
14
15
17
20
22
25
Sea temperature, °C
Madrid
No coastline within reach
Melbourne
20
21
20
18
15
13
12
11
12
14
17
19
Rainfall, mm
Madrid
32
34
35
46
49
20
9
10
24
64
53
42
Melbourne
46
48
45
58
50
58
46
52
60
56
69
65
Daylight, hours per day
Madrid
10
11
12
13
14
15
15
14
13
11
10
9
Melbourne
15
14
12
11
10
10
10
11
12
13
14
15
Sunshine, hours per day
Madrid
5
5
7
8
9
11
12
11
9
6
5
4
Melbourne
9
7
7
6
5
4
4
6
6
7
7
9

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. Madrid: 1991-2020 normals, Madrid (1.7 km from centre). Melbourne: 1991-2020 normals, Latrobe University / Kingsbury (13.1 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromMadridMelbourne
DohaDOH
6 h 55 m
no fares
MAD · 14 km
14 h 45 m
no fares
MEL · 19 km
SantiagoSCL
13 h 15 m
no fares
MAD · 14 km
13 h 55 m
no fares
MEL · 19 km
Los AngelesLAX, BUR, SNA, VNY
11 h 40 m
no fares
MAD · 14 km
15 h 40 m
no fares
MEL · 19 km
Hong KongHKG
13 h 0 m
no fares
MAD · 14 km
9 h 25 m
no fares
MEL · 19 km
IstanbulIST, SAW
3 h 50 m
€182-348
MAD · 14 km
17 h 55 m
no fares
MEL · 19 km
DubaiDXB, DWC
7 h 20 m
€356-444
2 stops
MAD · 14 km
14 h 20 m
€856-961
2 stops
MEL · 19 km
ShanghaiPVG, SHA
12 h 45 m
no fares
MAD · 14 km
10 h 5 m
€542-1650
1 stop
MEL · 19 km
BangkokBKK, DMK
12 h 40 m
no fares
MAD · 14 km
9 h 15 m
€407-480
1 stop
MEL · 19 km
TokyoHND, NRT
13 h 20 m
no fares
MAD · 14 km
10 h 15 m
€809-850
1 stop
MEL · 19 km
Abu DhabiAUH
7 h 20 m
no fares
MAD · 14 km
14 h 20 m
no fares
MEL · 19 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

MeasureMadridMelbourne
Official languageSpanishEnglish
CurrencyEuro (EUR)Australian Dollar (AUD)
SocketsCF230 V, 50 HzI230 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideRightLeft
Time zoneUTC+1, UTC+2 in summerUTC+10, UTC+11 in summer
Emergency number112000
Elevation663 m31 m
Main airportAdolfo Suárez Madrid–Barajas Airport (MAD)14 km from centre236 non-stop destinationsMelbourne Airport (MEL)19 km from centre66 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year12 days13 days

By the numbers

MeasureMadridMelbourne
City population3,506,7305,350,705
People per km²5,801535
Museums within 10 km8842
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km41
Distinct cuisines in the centre10686
Swim season, months above 21 °C–None

Where else could you go?

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