VacationSelector

Ottawa or Riga?

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

Your match

Ottawa
43
match

Wins on good for families and places to eat 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.

OttawaRiga
Beaches & swimming. Riga leads by 40 points.40
OttawaRiga
Score040
Swim season months00
Beaches 10 km957
Coast distance423 km12 km
Water distance—12 km
Places to eat. Ottawa leads by 5 points.5
OttawaRiga
Score6459
Restaurants within 2 km of centre684470
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km3433
Museums & heritage. Riga leads by 29 points.29
OttawaRiga
Score3261
Museums within 10 km1569
Museums within 2 km of centre847
Share of museums within 2 km %5368
Unesco sites within 50 km11
Nightlife. Riga leads by 7 points.7
OttawaRiga
Score4451
Drinking venues within 4 km432584
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre303456
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %7078
Nightclubs within 4 km3554
Nature & day trips. Riga leads by 3 points.3
OttawaRiga
Score4144
Protected land share 50 km %810
Landscape blanket share 50 km %00
Land share of disc %10073
Park area within 2 km122 hectares68 hectares
Good for families. Ottawa leads by 11 points.11
OttawaRiga
Score4635
Tourist attractions within 2 km117
Park area within 2 km122 hectares68 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km11
Sights concentration. Riga leads by 12 points.12
OttawaRiga
Score5062
Notable places within 2 km71137
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Riga leads by 22 points.22
OttawaRiga
Score5476
Price level global8453.7
Daily budget—€132
Year-round weather. Ottawa leads by 1 points.1
OttawaRiga
Score5352
Monthly daytime high-4.9 °C to 27 °C-0.1 °C to 23.5 °C
Monthly rainfall53 mm to 94 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
Ottawa
-5
-3
3
11
19
24
27
26
22
14
6
-2
Riga
0
0
4
12
17
21
24
22
17
11
5
1
Sea temperature, °C
Ottawa
No coastline within reach
Riga
2
1
1
3
9
14
18
19
16
11
8
5
Rainfall, mm
Ottawa
60
53
56
74
66
87
82
89
78
94
59
80
Riga
43
40
35
33
52
69
87
78
65
82
58
50
Daylight, hours per day
Ottawa
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

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. Ottawa: 1991-2020 normals, Ottawa CDA RCS (5.3 km from centre). Riga: 1991-2020 normals, Riga (4.1 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromOttawaRiga
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
6 h 55 m
no fares
YOW · 12 km
2 h 40 m
no fares
RIX · 9 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
7 h 20 m
no fares
YOW · 12 km
2 h 40 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.

Before you go

MeasureOttawaRiga
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
Elevation70 m6 m
Main airportOttawa Macdonald-Cartier International Airport (YOW)12 km from centre46 non-stop destinationsRiga International Airport (RIX)9 km from centre101 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year11 days–

By the numbers

MeasureOttawaRiga
City population1,017,449588,911
People per km²366–
Museums within 10 km2012
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km11
Distinct cuisines in the centre6255
Swim season, months above 21 °C–None

Where else could you go?

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