VacationSelector

Montreal or Riga?

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

Your match

Montreal
47
match

Wins on places to eat and good for families with your weighting.

Riga
✓ Best match
53
match

Wins on beaches & swimming and museums & heritage 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.

MontrealRiga
Beaches & swimming. Riga leads by 40 points.40
MontrealRiga
Score040
Swim season months00
Beaches 10 km757
Coast distance276 km12 km
Water distance12 km
Places to eat. Montreal leads by 15 points.15
MontrealRiga
Score7459
Restaurants within 2 km of centre1,016470
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km4933
Museums & heritage. Riga leads by 24 points.24
MontrealRiga
Score3761
Museums within 10 km3969
Museums within 2 km of centre1947
Share of museums within 2 km %4968
Unesco sites within 50 km01
Nightlife. Montreal leads by 11 points.11
MontrealRiga
Score6251
Drinking venues within 4 km1,012584
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre493456
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %4978
Nightclubs within 4 km7454
Nature & day trips. Riga leads by 8 points.8
MontrealRiga
Score3644
Protected land share 50 km %210
Landscape blanket share 50 km %00
Land share of disc %10073
Park area within 2 km189 hectares68 hectares
Good for families. Montreal leads by 15 points.15
MontrealRiga
Score5035
Tourist attractions within 2 km117
Park area within 2 km189 hectares68 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km11
Sights concentration. Riga leads by 6 points.6
MontrealRiga
Score5662
Notable places within 2 km98137
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Riga leads by 22 points.22
MontrealRiga
Score5476
Price level global8453.7
Daily budget€132
Year-round weather. Riga leads by 2 points.2
MontrealRiga
Score5052
Monthly daytime high-3.5 °C to 26.5 °C-0.1 °C to 23.5 °C
Monthly rainfall69 mm to 121 mm33 mm to 87 mm
Dry months03
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
Montreal
-3
-3
3
11
19
24
27
26
22
13
6
-1
Riga
0
0
4
12
17
21
24
22
17
11
5
1
Sea temperature, °C
Montreal
No coastline within reach
Riga
2
1
1
3
9
14
18
19
16
11
8
5
Rainfall, mm
Montreal
84
69
89
121
89
107
98
109
88
100
85
94
Riga
43
40
35
33
52
69
87
78
65
82
58
50
Daylight, hours per day
Montreal
9
10
12
14
15
16
15
14
13
11
10
9
Riga
8
9
12
14
17
18
17
15
13
10
8
7
Sunshine, hours per day
Montreal
3
4
6
6
8
8
9
8
7
4
3
3
Riga
No sunshine record

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. Montreal: 1991-2020 normals, Montreal McTavish (3.2 km from centre). Riga: 1991-2020 normals, Riga (4.1 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromMontrealRiga
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
6 h 50 m
€447-599
1 stop
YUL · 16 km
2 h 40 m
no fares
RIX · 9 km
FrankfurtFRA, HHN
7 h 35 m
€591-764
2 stops
YUL · 16 km
2 h 10 m
no fares
RIX · 9 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
7 h 10 m
€308-372
YUL · 16 km
2 h 40 m
no fares
RIX · 9 km
AmsterdamAMS
7 h 10 m
no fares
YUL · 16 km
2 h 15 m
no fares
RIX · 9 km
ViennaVIE
8 h 15 m
no fares
YUL · 16 km
2 h 0 m
no fares
RIX · 9 km
BerlinBER
7 h 45 m
no fares
YUL · 16 km
1 h 40 m
no fares
RIX · 9 km
RomeFCO, CIA
8 h 25 m
no fares
YUL · 16 km
2 h 50 m
no fares
RIX · 9 km
CopenhagenCPH
7 h 30 m
no fares
YUL · 16 km
1 h 30 m
no fares
RIX · 9 km
BarcelonaBCN
7 h 35 m
no fares
YUL · 16 km
3 h 25 m
no fares
RIX · 9 km
BrusselsBRU, CRL
7 h 10 m
€506-644
1 stop
YUL · 16 km
2 h 20 m
no fares
RIX · 9 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

MeasureMontrealRiga
Official languageFrench, EnglishLatvian
CurrencyCanadian Dollar (CAD)Euro (EUR)
SocketsAB120 V, 60 HzCF230 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideRightRight
Time zoneUTC-5, UTC-4 in summerUTC+2, UTC+3 in summer
Emergency number911112
Elevation31 m6 m
Main airportMontreal / Pierre Elliott Trudeau International Airport (YUL)16 km from centre164 non-stop destinationsRiga International Airport (RIX)9 km from centre101 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year10 days

By the numbers

MeasureMontrealRiga
City population1,895,211588,911
People per km²3,806
Museums within 10 km3712
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km01
Distinct cuisines in the centre9755
Swim season, months above 21 °CNone

Where else could you go?

Every comparison below shares a destination with this one, so you can follow Montreal or Riga 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. 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. Sea surface temperature from NOAA OISST v2.1, NOAA Physical Sciences Laboratory. 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.