VacationSelector

Manila or Sao Paulo?

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

Your match

Manila
✓ Best match
60
match

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

Sao Paulo
56
match

Wins on nature & day trips 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.

ManilaSao Paulo
Beaches & swimming. Manila leads by 76 points.76
ManilaSao Paulo
Score760
Swim season months120
Beaches 10 km30
Coast distance2 km51 km
Water distance2 km
Places to eat. Sao Paulo leads by 15 points.15
ManilaSao Paulo
Score5873
Restaurants within 2 km of centre1,0151,735
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km1727
Museums & heritage. Manila leads by 7 points.7
ManilaSao Paulo
Score5043
Museums within 10 km7782
Museums within 2 km of centre2326
Share of museums within 2 km %3032
Unesco sites within 50 km10
Nightlife. Sao Paulo leads by 11 points.11
ManilaSao Paulo
Score6172
Drinking venues within 4 km1,0821,747
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre374896
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %3551
Nightclubs within 4 km36118
Nature & day trips. Sao Paulo leads by 22 points.22
ManilaSao Paulo
Score2951
Protected land share 50 km %426
Landscape blanket share 50 km %015
Land share of disc %7895
Park area within 2 km54 hectares52 hectares
Good for families. Manila leads by 5 points.5
ManilaSao Paulo
Score6055
Tourist attractions within 2 km3738
Park area within 2 km54 hectares52 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km31
Sights concentration. Manila leads by 2 points.2
ManilaSao Paulo
Score5250
Notable places within 2 km7968
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Manila leads by 9 points.9
ManilaSao Paulo
Score9081
Price level global33.746.1
Daily budget
Year-round weather. Sao Paulo leads by 22 points.22
ManilaSao Paulo
Score6183
Monthly daytime high30.5 °C to 34.6 °C22.8 °C to 29.2 °C
Monthly rainfall24 mm to 564 mm26 mm to 297 mm
Dry months41
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
Manila
31
31
33
35
34
33
32
31
31
32
31
31
Sao Paulo
28
29
28
27
24
23
23
25
25
27
27
28
Sea temperature, °C
Manila
27
27
28
29
30
30
29
29
29
29
28
28
Sao Paulo
No coastline within reach
Rainfall, mm
Manila
26
24
40
36
220
314
487
564
509
297
152
109
Sao Paulo
297
259
206
89
64
55
53
26
82
128
146
234
Daylight, hours per day
Manila
11
12
12
13
13
13
13
13
12
12
12
11
Sao Paulo
13
13
12
12
11
11
11
11
12
13
13
14
Sunshine, hours per day
Manila
No sunshine record
Sao Paulo
4
6
6
5
5
5
6
6
5
6
5
5

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. Manila: 1991-2020 normals, Science Garden (6 km from centre). Sao Paulo: 1991-2020 normals, Sao Paulo (5.9 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromManilaSao Paulo
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
16 h 45 m
no fares
MNL · 11 km
9 h 40 m
€576-611
GRU · 21 km
BeijingPEK, PKX
4 h 5 m
€211-222
1 stop
MNL · 11 km
21 h 20 m
€1,139-1567
2 stops
GRU · 21 km
DubaiDXB, DWC
8 h 45 m
€428-448
MNL · 11 km
15 h 0 m
no fares
GRU · 21 km
DohaDOH
9 h 15 m
no fares
MNL · 11 km
14 h 35 m
no fares
GRU · 21 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
13 h 20 m
no fares
MNL · 11 km
11 h 45 m
no fares
GRU · 21 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

MeasureManilaSao Paulo
Official languageEnglish, Filipino, TaglishPortuguese
CurrencyPhilippine Peso (PHP)Brazilian Real (BRL)
SocketsABC220 V, 60 HzCN60 Hz
Driving sideRightRight
Time zoneUTC+8UTC-3
Emergency number911Police 190, ambulance 192, fire 193
Elevation9 m760 m
Main airportNinoy Aquino International Airport (MNL)11 km from centre88 non-stop destinationsSão Paulo/Guarulhos–Governor André Franco Montoro International Airport (GRU)21 km from centre102 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year18 days15 days

By the numbers

MeasureManilaSao Paulo
City population1,902,59011,451,999
People per km²76,1047,519
Museums within 10 km2790
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km10
Distinct cuisines in the centre3959
Swim season, months above 21 °C12 months

Where else could you go?

Every comparison below shares a destination with this one, so you can follow Manila or Sao Paulo 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). Public holidays from Nager.Date (MIT). Exchange rates via Frankfurter, based on European Central Bank reference rates. 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.

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.