VacationSelector

Malaga or Riga?

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 year-round weather and beaches & swimming with your weighting.

Riga
53
match

Wins on sights concentration and museums & heritage 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.

MalagaRiga
Beaches & swimming. Malaga leads by 26 points.26
MalagaRiga
Score6640
Swim season months30
Beaches 10 km2157
Coast distance0 km12 km
Water distance0 km12 km
Places to eat. Malaga leads by 10 points.10
MalagaRiga
Score6959
Restaurants within 2 km of centre1,002470
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km3433
Museums & heritage. Riga leads by 8 points.8
MalagaRiga
Score5361
Museums within 10 km4069
Museums within 2 km of centre3547
Share of museums within 2 km %8868
Unesco sites within 50 km11
Nightlife. Malaga leads by 3 points.3
MalagaRiga
Score5451
Drinking venues within 4 km715584
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre486456
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %6878
Nightclubs within 4 km4554
Nature & day trips. Riga leads by 1 points.1
MalagaRiga
Score4344
Protected land share 50 km %710
Landscape blanket share 50 km %00
Land share of disc %6373
Park area within 2 km85 hectares68 hectares
Good for families. Malaga leads by 18 points.18
MalagaRiga
Score5335
Tourist attractions within 2 km337
Park area within 2 km85 hectares68 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km01
Sights concentration. Riga leads by 25 points.25
MalagaRiga
Score3762
Notable places within 2 km33137
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Riga leads by 5 points.5
MalagaRiga
Score7176
Price level global60.853.7
Daily budget€122€132
Year-round weather. Malaga leads by 30 points.30
MalagaRiga
Score8252
Monthly daytime high17.2 °C to 31.5 °C-0.1 °C to 23.5 °C
Monthly rainfall0 mm to 88 mm33 mm to 87 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
Riga
0
0
4
12
17
21
24
22
17
11
5
1
Sea temperature, °C
Malaga
15
15
15
16
18
20
22
23
22
20
17
16
Riga
2
1
1
3
9
14
18
19
16
11
8
5
Rainfall, mm
Malaga
62
55
66
41
23
4
0
3
25
60
78
88
Riga
43
40
35
33
52
69
87
78
65
82
58
50
Daylight, hours per day
Malaga
10
11
12
13
14
15
14
14
13
11
10
10
Riga
8
9
12
14
17
18
17
15
13
10
8
7
Sunshine, hours per day
Malaga
6
6
7
8
10
11
12
11
8
7
6
5
Riga
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). Riga: 1991-2020 normals, Riga (4.1 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromMalagaRiga
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
2 h 40 m
€67-129
AGP · 9 km
2 h 40 m
no fares
RIX · 9 km
StockholmARN, BMA, NYO, VST
4 h 15 m
€112-120
AGP · 9 km
1 h 15 m
no fares
RIX · 9 km
HelsinkiHEL
4 h 35 m
€198-239
2 stops
AGP · 9 km
1 h 5 m
no fares
RIX · 9 km
AmsterdamAMS
2 h 55 m
€146-177
AGP · 9 km
2 h 15 m
no fares
RIX · 9 km
BarcelonaBCN
1 h 35 m
€73-109
AGP · 9 km
3 h 25 m
no fares
RIX · 9 km
OsloOSL, TRF
4 h 0 m
€151-202
1 stop
AGP · 9 km
1 h 40 m
no fares
RIX · 9 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
2 h 25 m
€92
AGP · 9 km
2 h 40 m
no fares
RIX · 9 km
CopenhagenCPH
3 h 35 m
€107-122
AGP · 9 km
1 h 30 m
no fares
RIX · 9 km
DublinDUB
2 h 50 m
€122-139
1 stop
AGP · 9 km
2 h 55 m
no fares
RIX · 9 km
MarrakechRAK
1 h 25 m
€58-149
AGP · 9 km
5 h 5 m
no fares
RIX · 9 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

MeasureMalagaRiga
Official languageSpanishLatvian
CurrencyEuro (EUR)Euro (EUR)
SocketsCF230 V, 50 HzCF230 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideRightRight
Time zoneUTC+1, UTC+2 in summerUTC+2, UTC+3 in summer
Emergency number112112
Elevation18 m6 m
Main airportMálaga-Costa del Sol Airport (AGP)9 km from centre165 non-stop destinationsRiga International Airport (RIX)9 km from centre101 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year12 days

By the numbers

MeasureMalagaRiga
City population599,063588,911
People per km²1,517
Museums within 10 km3212
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km11
Distinct cuisines in the centre6555
Swim season, months above 21 °C3 monthsNone

Where else could you go?

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