VacationSelector

Paphos or Riga?

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

Your match

Paphos
46
match

Wins on beaches & swimming and year-round weather with your weighting.

Riga
✓ Best match
53
match

Wins on sights concentration 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.

PaphosRiga
Beaches & swimming. Paphos leads by 39 points.39
PaphosRiga
Score7940
Swim season months60
Beaches 10 km2757
Coast distance1 km12 km
Water distance1 km12 km
Places to eat. Riga leads by 15 points.15
PaphosRiga
Score4459
Restaurants within 2 km of centre251470
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km2233
Museums & heritage. Riga leads by 39 points.39
PaphosRiga
Score2261
Museums within 10 km869
Museums within 2 km of centre347
Share of museums within 2 km %3868
Unesco sites within 50 km21
Nightlife. Riga leads by 21 points.21
PaphosRiga
Score3051
Drinking venues within 4 km224584
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre161456
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %7278
Nightclubs within 4 km1154
Nature & day trips. Riga leads by 21 points.21
PaphosRiga
Score2344
Protected land share 50 km %210
Landscape blanket share 50 km %00
Land share of disc %3373
Park area within 2 km27 hectares68 hectares
Good for families. Paphos leads by 7 points.7
PaphosRiga
Score4235
Tourist attractions within 2 km307
Park area within 2 km27 hectares68 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km01
Sights concentration. Riga leads by 43 points.43
PaphosRiga
Score1962
Notable places within 2 km12137
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Riga leads by 6 points.6
PaphosRiga
Score7076
Price level global61.453.7
Daily budget€129€132
Year-round weather. Paphos leads by 34 points.34
PaphosRiga
Score8652
Monthly daytime high17 °C to 30.8 °C-0.1 °C to 23.5 °C
Monthly rainfall0 mm to 98 mm33 mm to 87 mm
Dry months83
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
Paphos
17
17
19
21
25
28
30
31
29
27
23
19
Riga
0
0
4
12
17
21
24
22
17
11
5
1
Sea temperature, °C
Paphos
17
17
17
18
21
24
27
28
27
25
22
19
Riga
2
1
1
3
9
14
18
19
16
11
8
5
Rainfall, mm
Paphos
81
47
29
17
10
2
1
0
5
14
42
98
Riga
43
40
35
33
52
69
87
78
65
82
58
50
Daylight, hours per day
Paphos
10
11
12
13
14
14
14
14
12
11
10
10
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. Paphos: 1991-2020 normals, Paphos Airport (8.4 km from centre). Riga: 1991-2020 normals, Riga (4.1 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromPaphosRiga
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
4 h 25 m
€125-167
PFO · 8 km
2 h 40 m
no fares
RIX · 9 km
ManchesterMAN
4 h 40 m
no fares
PFO · 8 km
2 h 40 m
no fares
RIX · 9 km
HelsinkiHEL
4 h 5 m
no fares
LCA · 110 km
1 h 5 m
no fares
RIX · 9 km
ViennaVIE
3 h 0 m
€206-323
1 stop
PFO · 8 km
2 h 0 m
no fares
RIX · 9 km
TallinnTLL
4 h 0 m
no fares
PFO · 8 km
1 h 0 m
no fares
RIX · 9 km
Tel Aviv YafoTLV
1 h 5 m
€149-173
PFO · 8 km
4 h 5 m
no fares
RIX · 9 km
StockholmARN, BMA, NYO, VST
4 h 10 m
no fares
LCA · 110 km
1 h 15 m
no fares
RIX · 9 km
OsloOSL, TRF
4 h 30 m
no fares
LCA · 110 km
1 h 40 m
no fares
RIX · 9 km
AmsterdamAMS
4 h 5 m
€253-340
1 stop
PFO · 8 km
2 h 15 m
no fares
RIX · 9 km
BerlinBER
3 h 35 m
€265-355
2 stops
PFO · 8 km
1 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. 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

MeasurePaphosRiga
Official languageTurkish, Greek, Modern GreekLatvian
CurrencyEuro (EUR)Euro (EUR)
SocketsG240 V, 50 HzCF230 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideLeftRight
Time zoneUTC+2, UTC+3 in summerUTC+2, UTC+3 in summer
Emergency number112112
Elevation72 m6 m
Main airportPaphos International Airport (PFO)8 km from centre57 non-stop destinationsRiga International Airport (RIX)9 km from centre101 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year17 days

By the numbers

MeasurePaphosRiga
City population35,961588,911
People per km²1,987
Museums within 10 km412
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km21
Distinct cuisines in the centre3655
Swim season, months above 21 °C6 monthsNone

Where else could you go?

Every comparison below shares a destination with this one, so you can follow Paphos 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. 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. 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. Exchange rates via Frankfurter, based on European Central Bank reference rates.

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.