VacationSelector

Portland or San Diego?

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

Your match

Portland
42
match

Wins on places to eat and nightlife with your weighting.

San Diego
✓ Best match
58
match

Wins on beaches & swimming and good for families 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.

PortlandSan Diego
Beaches & swimming. San Diego leads by 63 points.63
PortlandSan Diego
Score063
Swim season months01
Beaches 10 km2742
Coast distance69 km1 km
Water distance1 km
Places to eat. Portland leads by 11 points.11
PortlandSan Diego
Score7463
Restaurants within 2 km of centre1,011823
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km4427
Museums & heritage. San Diego leads by 9 points.9
PortlandSan Diego
Score3544
Museums within 10 km2359
Museums within 2 km of centre1530
Share of museums within 2 km %6551
Unesco sites within 50 km00
Nightlife. Portland leads by 8 points.8
PortlandSan Diego
Score5850
Drinking venues within 4 km942615
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre518408
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %5566
Nightclubs within 4 km3231
Nature & day trips. San Diego leads by 20 points.20
PortlandSan Diego
Score3555
Protected land share 50 km %136
Landscape blanket share 50 km %30
Land share of disc %10052
Park area within 2 km37 hectares308 hectares
Good for families. San Diego leads by 41 points.41
PortlandSan Diego
Score3475
Tourist attractions within 2 km840
Park area within 2 km37 hectares308 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km23
Sights concentration. San Diego leads by 5 points.5
PortlandSan Diego
Score3540
Notable places within 2 km2940
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Portland and San Diego are level on 43.
PortlandSan Diego
Score4343
Price level global100100
Daily budget
Year-round weather. San Diego leads by 23 points.23
PortlandSan Diego
Score6588
Monthly daytime high7.9 °C to 27.7 °C18.6 °C to 25 °C
Monthly rainfall13 mm to 145 mm0 mm to 56 mm
Dry months39
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
Portland
8
11
13
16
20
23
27
28
25
18
12
8
San Diego
19
19
19
20
21
22
24
25
25
23
21
19
Sea temperature, °C
Portland
No coastline within reach
San Diego
15
15
16
16
17
19
20
21
21
19
18
16
Rainfall, mm
Portland
128
94
101
75
65
41
13
14
39
87
138
145
San Diego
50
56
37
17
7
1
2
0
3
13
20
42
Daylight, hours per day
Portland
9
10
12
14
15
16
15
14
13
11
10
9
San Diego
10
11
12
13
14
14
14
13
12
11
11
10

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. Portland: 1991-2020 normals, Portland International Airport (9.8 km from centre). San Diego: 1991-2020 normals, San Diego International Airport (2.8 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromPortlandSan Diego
Los AngelesLAX, BUR, SNA, VNY
2 h 15 m
no fares
PDX · 10 km
50 m
no fares
SAN · 3 km
PhoenixPHX, AZA
2 h 35 m
no fares
PDX · 10 km
1 h 15 m
no fares
SAN · 3 km
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
5 h 20 m
no fares
PDX · 10 km
5 h 15 m
€299-455
1 stop
SAN · 3 km
DenverDEN, APA
2 h 30 m
€167-182
PDX · 10 km
2 h 15 m
€64-224
SAN · 3 km
ChicagoORD, MDW, DPA, PWK +1
3 h 55 m
no fares
PDX · 10 km
3 h 55 m
no fares
SAN · 3 km
San FranciscoSFO
1 h 45 m
no fares
PDX · 10 km
1 h 30 m
€121-158
SAN · 3 km
Las VegasLAS
2 h 5 m
€173-370
PDX · 10 km
1 h 10 m
no fares
SAN · 3 km
SeattleSEA, BFI
55 m
no fares
PDX · 10 km
2 h 40 m
no fares
SAN · 3 km
DallasDFW, DAL, AFW
3 h 45 m
no fares
PDX · 10 km
2 h 55 m
no fares
SAN · 3 km
Puerto VallartaPVR
4 h 25 m
no fares
PDX · 10 km
2 h 45 m
no fares
SAN · 3 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

MeasurePortlandSan Diego
CurrencyUS Dollar (USD)US Dollar (USD)
SocketsAB120 V, 60 HzAB120 V, 60 Hz
Driving sideRightRight
Time zoneUTC-8, UTC-7 in summerUTC-8, UTC-7 in summer
Emergency number911911
Elevation152 m129 m
Main airportPortland International Airport (PDX)10 km from centre87 non-stop destinationsSan Diego International Airport (SAN)3 km from centre87 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year12 days13 days

By the numbers

MeasurePortlandSan Diego
City population652,5031,386,932
People per km²1,7361,438
Museums within 10 km1726
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km00
Distinct cuisines in the centre8244
Swim season, months above 21 °C1 month

Where else could you go?

Every comparison below shares a destination with this one, so you can follow Portland or San Diego 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. 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.