VacationSelector

Paphos or Rio de Janeiro?

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 year-round weather with your weighting.

Rio de Janeiro
✓ Best match
69
match

Wins on museums & heritage 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.

PaphosRio de Janeiro
Beaches & swimming. Rio de Janeiro leads by 21 points.21
PaphosRio de Janeiro
Score79100
Swim season months612
Beaches 10 km2761
Coast distance1 km1 km
Water distance1 km1 km
Places to eat. Rio de Janeiro leads by 10 points.10
PaphosRio de Janeiro
Score4454
Restaurants within 2 km of centre251804
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km2216
Museums & heritage. Rio de Janeiro leads by 47 points.47
PaphosRio de Janeiro
Score2269
Museums within 10 km8110
Museums within 2 km of centre351
Share of museums within 2 km %3846
Unesco sites within 50 km23
Nightlife. Rio de Janeiro leads by 27 points.27
PaphosRio de Janeiro
Score3057
Drinking venues within 4 km224818
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre161509
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %7262
Nightclubs within 4 km1150
Nature & day trips. Rio de Janeiro leads by 39 points.39
PaphosRio de Janeiro
Score2362
Protected land share 50 km %221
Landscape blanket share 50 km %017
Land share of disc %3357
Park area within 2 km27 hectares113 hectares
Good for families. Rio de Janeiro leads by 17 points.17
PaphosRio de Janeiro
Score4259
Tourist attractions within 2 km3030
Park area within 2 km27 hectares113 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km01
Sights concentration. Rio de Janeiro leads by 37 points.37
PaphosRio de Janeiro
Score1956
Notable places within 2 km1298
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Rio de Janeiro leads by 11 points.11
PaphosRio de Janeiro
Score7081
Price level global61.446.1
Daily budget€129
Year-round weather. Paphos leads by 1 points.1
PaphosRio de Janeiro
Score8685
Monthly daytime high17 °C to 30.8 °C24 °C to 28.4 °C
Monthly rainfall0 mm to 98 mm42 mm to 232 mm
Dry months80
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
Rio de Janeiro
28
28
28
27
25
24
24
25
25
26
26
27
Sea temperature, °C
Paphos
17
17
17
18
21
24
27
28
27
25
22
19
Rio de Janeiro
25
25
25
25
24
23
22
21
21
22
23
24
Rainfall, mm
Paphos
81
47
29
17
10
2
1
0
5
14
42
98
Rio de Janeiro
208
151
173
101
71
49
45
42
69
108
220
232
Daylight, hours per day
Paphos
10
11
12
13
14
14
14
14
12
11
10
10
Rio de Janeiro
13
13
12
12
11
11
11
11
12
13
13
14

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. Paphos: 1991-2020 normals, Paphos Airport (8.4 km from centre). Rio de Janeiro: 2001-2020 normals, NASA POWER reanalysis grid, no weather station within 90 km.

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromPaphosRio de Janeiro
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
4 h 25 m
€125-167
PFO · 8 km
11 h 35 m
€996-1109
2 stops
GIG · 12 km
AmsterdamAMS
4 h 5 m
€253-340
1 stop
PFO · 8 km
11 h 55 m
€900-974
1 stop
GIG · 12 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
4 h 5 m
€197-331
1 stop
PFO · 8 km
11 h 30 m
€957-1014
2 stops
GIG · 12 km
RomeFCO, CIA
2 h 55 m
no fares
PFO · 8 km
11 h 25 m
€897-908
GIG · 12 km
FrankfurtFRA, HHN
3 h 45 m
no fares
LCA · 110 km
11 h 55 m
€915-1205
2 stops
GIG · 12 km
DubaiDXB, DWC
3 h 25 m
no fares
LCA · 110 km
14 h 40 m
€1,154-1306
GIG · 12 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

MeasurePaphosRio de Janeiro
Official languageTurkish, Greek, Modern GreekPortuguese
CurrencyEuro (EUR)Brazilian Real (BRL)
SocketsG240 V, 50 HzCN60 Hz
Driving sideLeftRight
Time zoneUTC+2, UTC+3 in summerUTC-3
Emergency number112Police 190, ambulance 192, fire 193
Elevation72 m31 m
Main airportPaphos International Airport (PFO)8 km from centre57 non-stop destinationsRio de Janeiro Galeão – Tom Jobim International Airport (GIG)12 km from centre59 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year17 days14 days

By the numbers

MeasurePaphosRio de Janeiro
City population35,9616,211,223
People per km²1,9874,930
Museums within 10 km470
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km23
Distinct cuisines in the centre3627
Swim season, months above 21 °C6 months12 months

Where else could you go?

Every comparison below shares a destination with this one, so you can follow Paphos or Rio de Janeiro 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. Temperature and rainfall for destinations with no weather station are from the NASA POWER 2001-2020 climatology, derived from MERRA-2. Exchange rates via Frankfurter, based on European Central Bank reference rates. 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.