VacationSelector

Malaga or Seattle?

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 value for money and year-round weather with your weighting.

Seattle
52
match

Wins on sights concentration and places to eat 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.

MalagaSeattle
Beaches & swimming. Malaga leads by 6 points.6
MalagaSeattle
Score6660
Swim season months30
Beaches 10 km21100
Coast distance0 km1 km
Water distance0 km1 km
Places to eat. Seattle leads by 6 points.6
MalagaSeattle
Score6975
Restaurants within 2 km of centre1,0021,460
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km3435
Museums & heritage. Malaga leads by 17 points.17
MalagaSeattle
Score5336
Museums within 10 km4028
Museums within 2 km of centre3517
Share of museums within 2 km %8861
Unesco sites within 50 km10
Nightlife. Seattle leads by 3 points.3
MalagaSeattle
Score5457
Drinking venues within 4 km715873
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre486696
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %6880
Nightclubs within 4 km4534
Nature & day trips. Malaga leads by 3 points.3
MalagaSeattle
Score4340
Protected land share 50 km %79
Landscape blanket share 50 km %00
Land share of disc %6380
Park area within 2 km85 hectares63 hectares
Good for families. Malaga leads by 7 points.7
MalagaSeattle
Score5346
Tourist attractions within 2 km3317
Park area within 2 km85 hectares63 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km01
Sights concentration. Seattle leads by 15 points.15
MalagaSeattle
Score3752
Notable places within 2 km3376
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Malaga leads by 28 points.28
MalagaSeattle
Score7143
Price level global60.8100
Daily budget€122
Year-round weather. Malaga leads by 21 points.21
MalagaSeattle
Score8261
Monthly daytime high17.2 °C to 31.5 °C7.8 °C to 24.9 °C
Monthly rainfall0 mm to 88 mm15 mm to 160 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
Seattle
8
10
12
15
19
21
25
25
22
15
11
8
Sea temperature, °C
Malaga
15
15
15
16
18
20
22
23
22
20
17
16
Seattle
8
8
8
9
10
11
12
12
11
10
9
9
Rainfall, mm
Malaga
62
55
66
41
23
4
0
3
25
60
78
88
Seattle
147
96
106
81
48
37
15
25
41
99
160
147
Daylight, hours per day
Malaga
10
11
12
13
14
15
14
14
13
11
10
10
Seattle
9
10
12
14
15
16
16
14
13
11
9
9
Sunshine, hours per day
Malaga
6
6
7
8
10
11
12
11
8
7
6
5
Seattle
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). Seattle: 1991-2020 normals, Seattle-Tacoma Airport (17.3 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromMalagaSeattle
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
2 h 40 m
€67-129
AGP · 9 km
9 h 45 m
no fares
SEA · 18 km
BarcelonaBCN
1 h 35 m
€73-109
AGP · 9 km
10 h 55 m
no fares
SEA · 18 km
AmsterdamAMS
2 h 55 m
€146-177
AGP · 9 km
9 h 55 m
no fares
SEA · 18 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
2 h 25 m
€92
AGP · 9 km
10 h 10 m
no fares
SEA · 18 km
DublinDUB
2 h 50 m
€122-139
1 stop
AGP · 9 km
9 h 15 m
no fares
SEA · 18 km
RomeFCO, CIA
2 h 30 m
€59-73
AGP · 9 km
11 h 25 m
no fares
SEA · 18 km
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
7 h 35 m
no fares
AGP · 9 km
5 h 15 m
€300-424
SEA · 18 km
FrankfurtFRA, HHN
2 h 50 m
€124-199
1 stop
AGP · 9 km
10 h 20 m
€554-583
1 stop
SEA · 18 km
HelsinkiHEL
4 h 35 m
€198-239
2 stops
AGP · 9 km
9 h 40 m
no fares
SEA · 18 km
ReykjavikKEF, RKV
4 h 30 m
no fares
AGP · 9 km
7 h 30 m
no fares
SEA · 18 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

MeasureMalagaSeattle
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 m40 m
Main airportMálaga-Costa del Sol Airport (AGP)9 km from centre165 non-stop destinationsSeattle–Tacoma International Airport (SEA)18 km from centre135 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year12 days11 days

By the numbers

MeasureMalagaSeattle
City population599,063737,015
People per km²1,5171,996
Museums within 10 km3227
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km10
Distinct cuisines in the centre6578
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 Seattle 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.