VacationSelector

Riga or Sao Paulo?

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

Your match

Riga
53
match

Wins on beaches & swimming and museums & heritage with your weighting.

Sao Paulo
✓ Best match
56
match

Wins on year-round weather and nightlife 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.

RigaSao Paulo
Beaches & swimming. Riga leads by 40 points.40
RigaSao Paulo
Score400
Swim season months00
Beaches 10 km570
Coast distance12 km51 km
Water distance12 km
Places to eat. Sao Paulo leads by 14 points.14
RigaSao Paulo
Score5973
Restaurants within 2 km of centre4701,735
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km3327
Museums & heritage. Riga leads by 18 points.18
RigaSao Paulo
Score6143
Museums within 10 km6982
Museums within 2 km of centre4726
Share of museums within 2 km %6832
Unesco sites within 50 km10
Nightlife. Sao Paulo leads by 21 points.21
RigaSao Paulo
Score5172
Drinking venues within 4 km5841,747
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre456896
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %7851
Nightclubs within 4 km54118
Nature & day trips. Sao Paulo leads by 7 points.7
RigaSao Paulo
Score4451
Protected land share 50 km %1026
Landscape blanket share 50 km %015
Land share of disc %7395
Park area within 2 km68 hectares52 hectares
Good for families. Sao Paulo leads by 20 points.20
RigaSao Paulo
Score3555
Tourist attractions within 2 km738
Park area within 2 km68 hectares52 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km11
Sights concentration. Riga leads by 12 points.12
RigaSao Paulo
Score6250
Notable places within 2 km13768
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Sao Paulo leads by 5 points.5
RigaSao Paulo
Score7681
Price level global53.746.1
Daily budget€132
Year-round weather. Sao Paulo leads by 31 points.31
RigaSao Paulo
Score5283
Monthly daytime high-0.1 °C to 23.5 °C22.8 °C to 29.2 °C
Monthly rainfall33 mm to 87 mm26 mm to 297 mm
Dry months31
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
Riga
0
0
4
12
17
21
24
22
17
11
5
1
Sao Paulo
28
29
28
27
24
23
23
25
25
27
27
28
Sea temperature, °C
Riga
2
1
1
3
9
14
18
19
16
11
8
5
Sao Paulo
No coastline within reach
Rainfall, mm
Riga
43
40
35
33
52
69
87
78
65
82
58
50
Sao Paulo
297
259
206
89
64
55
53
26
82
128
146
234
Daylight, hours per day
Riga
8
9
12
14
17
18
17
15
13
10
8
7
Sao Paulo
13
13
12
12
11
11
11
11
12
13
13
14
Sunshine, hours per day
Riga
No sunshine record
Sao Paulo
4
6
6
5
5
5
6
6
5
6
5
5

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. Riga: 1991-2020 normals, Riga (4.1 km from centre). Sao Paulo: 1991-2020 normals, Sao Paulo (5.9 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromRigaSao Paulo
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
2 h 40 m
no fares
RIX · 9 km
11 h 50 m
no fares
GRU · 21 km
FrankfurtFRA, HHN
2 h 10 m
no fares
RIX · 9 km
12 h 10 m
no fares
GRU · 21 km
AmsterdamAMS
2 h 15 m
no fares
RIX · 9 km
12 h 10 m
no fares
GRU · 21 km
IstanbulIST, SAW
2 h 45 m
no fares
RIX · 9 km
13 h 5 m
no fares
GRU · 21 km
MilanMXP, BGY, LIN
2 h 35 m
no fares
RIX · 9 km
11 h 50 m
no fares
GRU · 21 km
MadridMAD
3 h 50 m
no fares
RIX · 9 km
10 h 30 m
€739-741
GRU · 21 km
MunichMUC
2 h 10 m
no fares
RIX · 9 km
12 h 15 m
no fares
GRU · 21 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
2 h 40 m
no fares
RIX · 9 km
11 h 45 m
no fares
GRU · 21 km
RomeFCO, CIA
2 h 50 m
no fares
RIX · 9 km
11 h 45 m
no fares
GRU · 21 km
BarcelonaBCN
3 h 25 m
no fares
RIX · 9 km
11 h 0 m
no fares
GRU · 21 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

MeasureRigaSao Paulo
Official languageLatvianPortuguese
CurrencyEuro (EUR)Brazilian Real (BRL)
SocketsCF230 V, 50 HzCN60 Hz
Driving sideRightRight
Time zoneUTC+2, UTC+3 in summerUTC-3
Emergency number112Police 190, ambulance 192, fire 193
Elevation6 m760 m
Main airportRiga International Airport (RIX)9 km from centre101 non-stop destinationsSão Paulo/Guarulhos–Governor André Franco Montoro International Airport (GRU)21 km from centre102 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year15 days

By the numbers

MeasureRigaSao Paulo
City population588,91111,451,999
People per km²7,519
Museums within 10 km1290
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km10
Distinct cuisines in the centre5559
Swim season, months above 21 °CNone

Where else could you go?

Every comparison below shares a destination with this one, so you can follow Riga or Sao Paulo 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. 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. Public holidays from Nager.Date (MIT). 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.