VacationSelector

Monaco or San Jose?

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

Your match

Monaco
✓ Best match
48
match

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

San Jose
39
match

Wins on nightlife 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.

MonacoSan Jose
Beaches & swimming. Monaco leads by 65 points.65
MonacoSan Jose
Score738
Swim season months40
Beaches 10 km501
Coast distance0 km14 km
Water distance0 km14 km
Places to eat. San Jose leads by 2 points.2
MonacoSan Jose
Score3941
Restaurants within 2 km of centre269313
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km1616
Museums & heritage. Monaco leads by 12 points.12
MonacoSan Jose
Score3826
Museums within 10 km2320
Museums within 2 km of centre89
Share of museums within 2 km %3545
Unesco sites within 50 km20
Nightlife. San Jose leads by 23 points.23
MonacoSan Jose
Score831
Drinking venues within 4 km69231
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre6388
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %9138
Nightclubs within 4 km716
Nature & day trips. San Jose leads by 17 points.17
MonacoSan Jose
Score5370
Protected land share 50 km %2426
Landscape blanket share 50 km %172
Land share of disc %5491
Park area within 2 km15 hectares101 hectares
Good for families. Monaco leads by 2 points.2
MonacoSan Jose
Score3533
Tourist attractions within 2 km142
Park area within 2 km15 hectares101 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km32
Sights concentration. Monaco leads by 50 points.50
MonacoSan Jose
Score6414
Notable places within 2 km1549
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for moneyNo source publishes a price level for Monaco.
Year-round weather. San Jose leads by 11 points.11
MonacoSan Jose
Score7485
Monthly daytime high13.3 °C to 27.9 °C15.4 °C to 26.8 °C
Monthly rainfall13 mm to 138 mm0 mm to 78 mm
Dry months38
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
Monaco
13
14
15
17
21
25
28
28
25
21
17
14
San Jose
15
17
19
21
23
26
27
27
27
24
19
17
Sea temperature, °C
Monaco
14
13
14
15
18
21
24
25
22
20
17
15
San Jose
12
12
12
12
12
13
14
15
15
14
13
13
Rainfall, mm
Monaco
74
53
51
69
42
34
13
18
84
124
138
91
San Jose
50
78
51
25
9
2
0
0
2
15
33
62
Daylight, hours per day
Monaco
9
11
12
13
15
15
15
14
13
11
10
9
San Jose
10
11
12
13
14
15
15
14
13
11
10
10
Sunshine, hours per day
Monaco
5
6
7
7
9
10
11
11
8
6
5
5
San Jose
No sunshine record

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. Monaco: 1991-2020 normals, Nice (19.9 km from centre). San Jose: 1991-2020 normals, San Jose / Santa Clara Trailer Village (8.2 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromMonacoSan Jose
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
1 h 55 m
€76-223
NCE · 18 km
10 h 50 m
no fares
SFO · 57 km
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
8 h 10 m
€666-799
1 stop
NCE · 18 km
5 h 35 m
€286-328
1 stop
SFO · 57 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
1 h 30 m
€78-111
NCE · 18 km
11 h 15 m
no fares
SFO · 57 km
FrankfurtFRA, HHN
1 h 30 m
€164-246
1 stop
NCE · 18 km
11 h 25 m
no fares
SFO · 57 km
BostonBOS, PSM
7 h 50 m
no fares
NCE · 18 km
5 h 45 m
no fares
SFO · 57 km
WashingtonIAD, DCA
8 h 40 m
no fares
NCE · 18 km
5 h 15 m
€252-262
1 stop
SFO · 57 km
RomeFCO, CIA
1 h 10 m
€69-133
NCE · 18 km
12 h 30 m
no fares
SFO · 57 km
MadridMAD
1 h 50 m
€137-165
NCE · 18 km
11 h 40 m
no fares
SFO · 57 km
DublinDUB
2 h 25 m
€133-138
1 stop
NCE · 18 km
10 h 20 m
no fares
SFO · 57 km
DubaiDXB, DWC
6 h 20 m
€375-433
NCE · 18 km
16 h 0 m
€1,005-1027
1 stop
SFO · 57 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

MeasureMonacoSan Jose
Official languageFrench
CurrencyEuro (EUR)US Dollar (USD)
SocketsCEF230 V, 50 HzAB120 V, 60 Hz
Driving sideRightRight
Time zoneUTC+1, UTC+2 in summerUTC-8, UTC-7 in summer
Emergency number112911
Elevation68 m25 m
Main airportNice-Côte d'Azur Airport (NCE)18 km from centre129 non-stop destinationsMineta San Jose International Airport (SJC)8 km from centre17 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year12 days13 days

By the numbers

MeasureMonacoSan Jose
City population38,8571,013,240
People per km²18,5032,167
Museums within 10 km1419
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km20
Distinct cuisines in the centre2930
Swim season, months above 21 °C4 monthsNone

Where else could you go?

Every comparison below shares a destination with this one, so you can follow Monaco or San Jose 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. Ground elevations sampled from the Mapzen terrain tiles via OpenTopoData, merging SRTM, ASTER, NED, EU-DEM and national sources. 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). 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). 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. Price level from World Bank open data (PPP conversion factor for private consumption and official exchange rate), 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.