VacationSelector

Melbourne or San Sebastian?

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

Your match

Melbourne
✓ Best match
60
match

Wins on nightlife and good for families with your weighting.

San Sebastian
51
match

Wins on value for money and nature & day trips 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.

MelbourneSan Sebastian
Beaches & swimming. Melbourne and San Sebastian are level on 55.
MelbourneSan Sebastian
Score5555
Swim season months02
Beaches 10 km1910
Coast distance4 km0 km
Water distance4 km0 km
Places to eat. Melbourne leads by 20 points.20
MelbourneSan Sebastian
Score7555
Restaurants within 2 km of centre1,888472
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km2926
Museums & heritage. Melbourne leads by 10 points.10
MelbourneSan Sebastian
Score4939
Museums within 10 km4217
Museums within 2 km of centre247
Share of museums within 2 km %5741
Unesco sites within 50 km13
Nightlife. Melbourne leads by 34 points.34
MelbourneSan Sebastian
Score7440
Drinking venues within 4 km1,921388
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre1,200338
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %6287
Nightclubs within 4 km12412
Nature & day trips. San Sebastian leads by 13 points.13
MelbourneSan Sebastian
Score4356
Protected land share 50 km %611
Landscape blanket share 50 km %00
Land share of disc %8152
Park area within 2 km166 hectares70 hectares
Good for families. Melbourne leads by 30 points.30
MelbourneSan Sebastian
Score6030
Tourist attractions within 2 km265
Park area within 2 km166 hectares70 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km11
Sights concentration. Melbourne leads by 3 points.3
MelbourneSan Sebastian
Score5754
Notable places within 2 km10389
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. San Sebastian leads by 21 points.21
MelbourneSan Sebastian
Score5071
Price level global90.260.8
Daily budget€122
Year-round weather. Melbourne leads by 18 points.18
MelbourneSan Sebastian
Score7658
Monthly daytime high13.6 °C to 26.8 °C11.2 °C to 22.9 °C
Monthly rainfall45 mm to 69 mm92 mm to 203 mm
Dry months00
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
Melbourne
27
27
24
20
17
14
14
15
17
20
22
25
San Sebastian
11
12
14
15
18
20
22
23
21
19
14
12
Sea temperature, °C
Melbourne
20
21
20
18
15
13
12
11
12
14
17
19
San Sebastian
13
12
13
14
16
19
21
22
21
18
16
14
Rainfall, mm
Melbourne
46
48
45
58
50
58
46
52
60
56
69
65
San Sebastian
151
125
119
126
122
96
92
109
117
155
203
153
Daylight, hours per day
Melbourne
15
14
12
11
10
10
10
11
12
13
14
15
San Sebastian
9
11
12
13
15
15
15
14
13
11
10
9
Sunshine, hours per day
Melbourne
9
7
7
6
5
4
4
6
6
7
7
9
San Sebastian
3
4
5
5
7
6
7
6
6
5
3
3

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. Melbourne: 1991-2020 normals, Latrobe University / Kingsbury (13.1 km from centre). San Sebastian: 1991-2020 normals, San Sebastian / Igueldo (6.1 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromMelbourneSan Sebastian
IstanbulIST, SAW
17 h 55 m
no fares
MEL · 19 km
3 h 45 m
€192-214
BIO · 75 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 2026-10, 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

MeasureMelbourneSan Sebastian
Official languageEnglishSpanish
CurrencyAustralian Dollar (AUD)Euro (EUR)
SocketsI230 V, 50 HzCF230 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideLeftRight
Time zoneUTC+10, UTC+11 in summerUTC+1, UTC+2 in summer
Emergency number000112
Elevation31 m6 m
Main airportMelbourne Airport (MEL)19 km from centre66 non-stop destinationsSan Sebastián Airport (EAS)16 km from centre11 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year13 days13 days

By the numbers

MeasureMelbourneSan Sebastian
City population5,350,705189,866
People per km²5353,118
Museums within 10 km4214
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km13
Distinct cuisines in the centre8645
Swim season, months above 21 °CNone2 months

Where else could you go?

Every comparison below shares a destination with this one, so you can follow Melbourne or San Sebastian 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. Tourism statistics from Eurostat, © European Union, reused under CC BY 4.0. 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.