VacationSelector

Malaga or Portland?

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

Your match

Malaga
✓ Best match
59
match

Wins on beaches & swimming and value for money with your weighting.

Portland
42
match

Wins on places to eat and nightlife 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.

MalagaPortland
Beaches & swimming. Malaga leads by 66 points.66
MalagaPortland
Score660
Swim season months30
Beaches 10 km2127
Coast distance0 km69 km
Water distance0 km
Places to eat. Portland leads by 5 points.5
MalagaPortland
Score6974
Restaurants within 2 km of centre1,0021,011
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km3444
Museums & heritage. Malaga leads by 18 points.18
MalagaPortland
Score5335
Museums within 10 km4023
Museums within 2 km of centre3515
Share of museums within 2 km %8865
Unesco sites within 50 km10
Nightlife. Portland leads by 4 points.4
MalagaPortland
Score5458
Drinking venues within 4 km715942
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre486518
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %6855
Nightclubs within 4 km4532
Nature & day trips. Malaga leads by 8 points.8
MalagaPortland
Score4335
Protected land share 50 km %713
Landscape blanket share 50 km %03
Land share of disc %63100
Park area within 2 km85 hectares37 hectares
Good for families. Malaga leads by 19 points.19
MalagaPortland
Score5334
Tourist attractions within 2 km338
Park area within 2 km85 hectares37 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km02
Sights concentration. Malaga leads by 2 points.2
MalagaPortland
Score3735
Notable places within 2 km3329
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Malaga leads by 28 points.28
MalagaPortland
Score7143
Price level global60.8100
Daily budget€122
Year-round weather. Malaga leads by 17 points.17
MalagaPortland
Score8265
Monthly daytime high17.2 °C to 31.5 °C7.9 °C to 27.7 °C
Monthly rainfall0 mm to 88 mm13 mm to 145 mm
Dry months53
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
Malaga
17
18
20
22
25
29
31
32
28
24
20
18
Portland
8
11
13
16
20
23
27
28
25
18
12
8
Sea temperature, °C
Malaga
15
15
15
16
18
20
22
23
22
20
17
16
Portland
No coastline within reach
Rainfall, mm
Malaga
62
55
66
41
23
4
0
3
25
60
78
88
Portland
128
94
101
75
65
41
13
14
39
87
138
145
Daylight, hours per day
Malaga
10
11
12
13
14
15
14
14
13
11
10
10
Portland
9
10
12
14
15
16
15
14
13
11
10
9
Sunshine, hours per day
Malaga
6
6
7
8
10
11
12
11
8
7
6
5
Portland
No sunshine record

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. Malaga: 1991-2020 normals, Malaga / Aeropuerto (8.2 km from centre). Portland: 1991-2020 normals, Portland International Airport (9.8 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromMalagaPortland
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
2 h 40 m
€67-129
AGP · 9 km
9 h 55 m
no fares
PDX · 10 km
AmsterdamAMS
2 h 55 m
€146-177
AGP · 9 km
10 h 5 m
no fares
PDX · 10 km
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
7 h 35 m
no fares
AGP · 9 km
5 h 20 m
no fares
PDX · 10 km
FrankfurtFRA, HHN
2 h 50 m
€124-199
1 stop
AGP · 9 km
10 h 30 m
no fares
PDX · 10 km
ReykjavikKEF, RKV
4 h 30 m
no fares
AGP · 9 km
7 h 45 m
no fares
PDX · 10 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

MeasureMalagaPortland
Official languageSpanish
CurrencyEuro (EUR)US Dollar (USD)
SocketsCF230 V, 50 HzAB120 V, 60 Hz
Driving sideRightRight
Time zoneUTC+1, UTC+2 in summerUTC-8, UTC-7 in summer
Emergency number112911
Elevation18 m152 m
Main airportMálaga-Costa del Sol Airport (AGP)9 km from centre165 non-stop destinationsPortland International Airport (PDX)10 km from centre87 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year12 days12 days

By the numbers

MeasureMalagaPortland
City population599,063652,503
People per km²1,5171,736
Museums within 10 km3217
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km10
Distinct cuisines in the centre6582
Swim season, months above 21 °C3 months

Where else could you go?

Every comparison below shares a destination with this one, so you can follow Malaga or Portland 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). 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. 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.