VacationSelector

Marseille or Portland?

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

Your match

Marseille
✓ Best match
57
match

Wins on beaches & swimming and sights concentration with your weighting.

Portland
42
match

Wins on 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.

MarseillePortland
Beaches & swimming. Marseille leads by 67 points.67
MarseillePortland
Score670
Swim season months20
Beaches 10 km6427
Coast distance0 km69 km
Water distance0 km
Places to eat. Marseille leads by 1 points.1
MarseillePortland
Score7574
Restaurants within 2 km of centre1,3201,011
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km3944
Museums & heritage. Marseille leads by 15 points.15
MarseillePortland
Score5035
Museums within 10 km3323
Museums within 2 km of centre2315
Share of museums within 2 km %7065
Unesco sites within 50 km10
Nightlife. Portland leads by 10 points.10
MarseillePortland
Score4858
Drinking venues within 4 km544942
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre454518
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %8355
Nightclubs within 4 km3032
Nature & day trips. Marseille leads by 2 points.2
MarseillePortland
Score3735
Protected land share 50 km %1513
Landscape blanket share 50 km %133
Land share of disc %56100
Park area within 2 km25 hectares37 hectares
Good for families. Marseille leads by 10 points.10
MarseillePortland
Score4434
Tourist attractions within 2 km178
Park area within 2 km25 hectares37 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km42
Sights concentration. Marseille leads by 23 points.23
MarseillePortland
Score5835
Notable places within 2 km11129
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Marseille leads by 19 points.19
MarseillePortland
Score6243
Price level global73.7100
Daily budget€160
Year-round weather. Marseille leads by 10 points.10
MarseillePortland
Score7565
Monthly daytime high11.8 °C to 30.7 °C7.9 °C to 27.7 °C
Monthly rainfall11 mm to 82 mm13 mm to 145 mm
Dry months63
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
Marseille
12
13
16
19
24
28
31
30
26
21
16
12
Portland
8
11
13
16
20
23
27
28
25
18
12
8
Sea temperature, °C
Marseille
13
13
13
14
16
19
21
22
21
19
17
15
Portland
No coastline within reach
Rainfall, mm
Marseille
47
30
29
51
38
28
11
26
82
72
76
41
Portland
128
94
101
75
65
41
13
14
39
87
138
145
Daylight, hours per day
Marseille
9
11
12
13
15
15
15
14
13
11
10
9
Portland
9
10
12
14
15
16
15
14
13
11
10
9
Sunshine, hours per day
Marseille
5
6
8
8
10
11
12
11
9
6
5
4
Portland
No sunshine record

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. Marseille: 1991-2020 normals, Marseille / Marignane (20.6 km from centre). Portland: 1991-2020 normals, Portland International Airport (9.8 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromMarseillePortland
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
1 h 50 m
€65-134
1 stop
MRS · 21 km
9 h 55 m
no fares
PDX · 10 km
AmsterdamAMS
1 h 50 m
no fares
MRS · 21 km
10 h 5 m
no fares
PDX · 10 km
FrankfurtFRA, HHN
1 h 35 m
no fares
MRS · 21 km
10 h 30 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 2026-09 to 2026-09, 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

MeasureMarseillePortland
Official languageFrench
CurrencyEuro (EUR)US Dollar (USD)
SocketsCE230 V, 50 HzAB120 V, 60 Hz
Driving sideRightRight
Time zoneUTC+1, UTC+2 in summerUTC-8, UTC-7 in summer
Emergency number112911
Elevation0 m152 m
Main airportMarseille Provence Airport (MRS)21 km from centre125 non-stop destinationsPortland International Airport (PDX)10 km from centre87 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year11 days12 days

By the numbers

MeasureMarseillePortland
City population886,040652,503
People per km²3,6831,736
Museums within 10 km2717
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km10
Distinct cuisines in the centre9382
Swim season, months above 21 °C2 months

Where else could you go?

Every comparison below shares a destination with this one, so you can follow Marseille 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.