VacationSelector

Madrid or Porto?

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 nature & day trips and nightlife with your weighting.

Porto
62
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.

The verdict

Choose Madrid if you want the denser city: more places to eat and drink near the centre, more to walk between, and protected countryside within day-trip reach. Summer is hot, up to 33°C in July.

Choose Porto if the coast matters more than the nightlife: 52 beaches nearby, a milder summer, and a smaller centre, provided you accept that the sea stays cool.

Scoreboard

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

MadridPorto
Beaches & swimming. Porto leads by 60 points.60
MadridPorto
Score060
Swim season months00
Beaches 10 km452
Coast distance305 km4 km
Water distance—3 km
Places to eat. Madrid leads by 15 points.15
MadridPorto
Score8368
Restaurants within 2 km of centre3,5081,172
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km2827
Museums & heritage. Madrid leads by 4 points.4
MadridPorto
Score7571
Museums within 10 km97101
Museums within 2 km of centre5957
Share of museums within 2 km %6156
Unesco sites within 50 km43
Nightlife. Madrid leads by 23 points.23
MadridPorto
Score8158
Drinking venues within 4 km2,414900
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre1,498570
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %6263
Nightclubs within 4 km34138
Nature & day trips. Madrid leads by 30 points.30
MadridPorto
Score6333
Protected land share 50 km %197
Landscape blanket share 50 km %00
Land share of disc %10061
Park area within 2 km187 hectares30 hectares
Good for families. Madrid leads by 12 points.12
MadridPorto
Score7765
Tourist attractions within 2 km61122
Park area within 2 km187 hectares30 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km31
Sights concentration. Madrid leads by 21 points.21
MadridPorto
Score7554
Notable places within 2 km28885
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Porto leads by 3 points.3
MadridPorto
Score7174
Price level global60.855.9
Daily budget€122€109
Year-round weather. Madrid leads by 1 points.1
MadridPorto
Score7271
Monthly daytime high10 °C to 32.7 °C13.8 °C to 25.2 °C
Monthly rainfall9 mm to 64 mm22 mm to 181 mm
Dry months73
0255075100

Where they differ

Madrid has around three times as many places to drink near the centre and many times as many nightclubs, so evenings have more range. Day trips are stronger too: 19% of the land around Madrid is protected against 7% around Porto, and there is far more park space close to the centre.

Porto is the one for swimming, with 52 beaches nearby against Madrid's 4, though neither has a month of sea at 21°C or more, and Porto's peaks at 17°C.

Where they are alike

Weather works across the calendar in both. Neither has a hard winter, with January highs of 10°C in Madrid and 14°C in Porto, and both get long, dry summers, so most months of the year are workable.

They also sit in countries with similar estimated daily budgets, and the museum offering is comparable in size, with UNESCO-listed places within day-trip reach in both, 4 from Madrid and 3 from Porto.

Which traveller are you?

Someone who wants the sea should take Porto, with 52 beaches nearby, though water peaking at 17°C means paddling and coast walks rather than long swims.

A traveller here to eat and stay out late belongs in Madrid, which has roughly three times as many restaurants near the centre as Porto and many times as many nightclubs, most of them close in.

Families divide. Madrid has 3 theme parks within reach against Porto's 1, plus far more park space near the centre, while Porto packs about twice as many tourist attractions into a smaller, more walkable core.

What the numbers don't tell you

The daily budget figures, €122 and €109, are national estimates of restaurant and hotel price levels, not measurements of either city. A capital and a heavily visited city can each sit well away from their country's average, by more than the gap between the two figures, so read them as country context rather than as what your week will cost.

Porto's beach count says nothing about the water: the sea peaks at 17°C. And Madrid's driest months, July and August, are also its hottest at 33°C, so dry does not mean comfortable.

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
Porto
14
15
18
18
21
23
25
25
24
20
17
14
Sea temperature, °C
Madrid
No coastline within reach
Porto
14
13
14
14
16
17
17
17
17
17
16
14
Rainfall, mm
Madrid
32
34
35
46
49
20
9
10
24
64
53
42
Porto
151
97
104
99
89
35
22
33
75
158
181
173
Daylight, hours per day
Madrid
10
11
12
13
14
15
15
14
13
11
10
9
Porto
10
11
12
13
15
15
15
14
13
11
10
9
Sunshine, hours per day
Madrid
5
5
7
8
9
11
12
11
9
6
5
4
Porto
5
5
7
8
9
9
10
9
8
5
5
4

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. Madrid: 1991-2020 normals, Madrid (1.7 km from centre). Porto: 1991-2020 normals, Porto / Serra Do Pilar (2.1 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Madrid is at its best in June and September, at 29°C and 27°C with only 20mm and 24mm of rain. July and August reach 33°C, dry but hard going, and October turns wet at 64mm.

Porto peaks in July and August at 25°C, with 22mm and 33mm of rain, the sea at its warmest in September. Autumn and winter are heavy there, 158mm in October and 181mm in November, which is when Madrid stays drier.

Getting there

Flying fromMadridPorto
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
1 h 55 m
€95-123
MAD · 14 km
2 h 5 m
€88-127
OPO · 12 km
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
2 h 10 m
€52-105
MAD · 14 km
2 h 10 m
€90-144
1 stop
OPO · 12 km
LisbonLIS
1 h 15 m
€40-87
MAD · 14 km
1 h 0 m
€81
OPO · 12 km
BarcelonaBCN
1 h 15 m
€116-130
1 stop
MAD · 14 km
1 h 45 m
€81-135
OPO · 12 km
GenevaGVA
1 h 50 m
€147-209
1 stop
MAD · 14 km
2 h 10 m
€128-166
1 stop
OPO · 12 km
MilanMXP, BGY, LIN
2 h 0 m
€53-86
MAD · 14 km
2 h 25 m
€81-96
OPO · 12 km
AmsterdamAMS
2 h 25 m
€175-213
MAD · 14 km
2 h 35 m
€158-202
1 stop
OPO · 12 km
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
7 h 25 m
€496-659
1 stop
MAD · 14 km
6 h 55 m
no fares
OPO · 12 km
Sao PauloGRU, VCP, CGH, RTE
10 h 30 m
€636-955
1 stop
MAD · 14 km
10 h 15 m
no fares
OPO · 12 km
MarrakechRAK
1 h 55 m
no fares
MAD · 14 km
1 h 55 m
no fares
OPO · 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

MeasureMadridPorto
Official languageSpanishPortuguese
CurrencyEuro (EUR)Euro (EUR)
SocketsCF230 V, 50 HzCF230 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideRightRight
Time zoneUTC+1, UTC+2 in summerUTC, UTC+1 in summer
Emergency number112112
Elevation663 m104 m
Main airportAdolfo Suárez Madrid–Barajas Airport (MAD)14 km from centre236 non-stop destinationsFrancisco de Sá Carneiro Airport (OPO)12 km from centre132 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year12 days14 days

By the numbers

MeasureMadridPorto
City population3,506,730231,800
People per km²5,8015,599
Museums within 10 km8842
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km43
Distinct cuisines in the centre10670
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 Porto 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.