VacationSelector

Riga or Zadar?

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

Your match

Riga
✓ Best match
53
match

Wins on places to eat and sights concentration with your weighting.

Zadar
47
match

Wins on beaches & swimming and year-round weather 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.

RigaZadar
Beaches & swimming. Zadar leads by 33 points.33
RigaZadar
Score4073
Swim season months04
Beaches 10 km5749
Coast distance12 km0 km
Water distance12 km0 km
Places to eat. Riga leads by 34 points.34
RigaZadar
Score5925
Restaurants within 2 km of centre470143
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km3311
Museums & heritage. Riga leads by 28 points.28
RigaZadar
Score6133
Museums within 10 km698
Museums within 2 km of centre478
Share of museums within 2 km %68100
Unesco sites within 50 km12
Nightlife. Riga leads by 26 points.26
RigaZadar
Score5125
Drinking venues within 4 km584194
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre456139
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %7872
Nightclubs within 4 km544
Nature & day trips. Zadar leads by 11 points.11
RigaZadar
Score4455
Protected land share 50 km %1012
Landscape blanket share 50 km %00
Land share of disc %7347
Park area within 2 km68 hectares30 hectares
Good for families. Riga leads by 4 points.4
RigaZadar
Score3531
Tourist attractions within 2 km79
Park area within 2 km68 hectares30 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km11
Sights concentration. Riga leads by 31 points.31
RigaZadar
Score6231
Notable places within 2 km13723
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Zadar leads by 4 points.4
RigaZadar
Score7680
Price level global53.748.5
Daily budget€132€138
Year-round weather. Zadar leads by 17 points.17
RigaZadar
Score5269
Monthly daytime high-0.1 °C to 23.5 °C10.4 °C to 31 °C
Monthly rainfall33 mm to 87 mm25 mm to 117 mm
Dry months32
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
Zadar
10
11
15
19
23
28
31
31
26
21
16
12
Sea temperature, °C
Riga
2
1
1
3
9
14
18
19
16
11
8
5
Zadar
14
13
13
14
18
22
24
25
23
20
18
16
Rainfall, mm
Riga
43
40
35
33
52
69
87
78
65
82
58
50
Zadar
73
64
59
62
58
49
25
32
82
80
117
99
Daylight, hours per day
Riga
8
9
12
14
17
18
17
15
13
10
8
7
Zadar
9
10
12
13
15
15
15
14
13
11
10
9

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. Riga: 1991-2020 normals, Riga (4.1 km from centre). Zadar: 1999-2020 (rainfall 1991-2020) normals, Zadar / Zemunik (9.9 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromRigaZadar
AmsterdamAMS
2 h 15 m
no fares
RIX · 9 km
2 h 10 m
€186-201
1 stop
SPU · 107 km
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
2 h 40 m
no fares
RIX · 9 km
2 h 20 m
no fares
ZAD · 10 km
StockholmARN, BMA, NYO, VST
1 h 15 m
no fares
RIX · 9 km
2 h 45 m
€123-165
1 stop
SPU · 107 km
HelsinkiHEL
1 h 5 m
no fares
RIX · 9 km
3 h 0 m
€232-306
2 stops
SPU · 107 km
OsloOSL, TRF
1 h 40 m
no fares
RIX · 9 km
2 h 55 m
no fares
SPU · 107 km
RomeFCO, CIA
2 h 50 m
no fares
RIX · 9 km
1 h 5 m
€294
SPU · 107 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
2 h 40 m
no fares
RIX · 9 km
2 h 5 m
€169-225
SPU · 107 km
ViennaVIE
2 h 0 m
no fares
RIX · 9 km
1 h 10 m
€45-192
ZAD · 10 km
MunichMUC
2 h 10 m
no fares
RIX · 9 km
1 h 25 m
no fares
SPU · 107 km
FrankfurtFRA, HHN
2 h 10 m
no fares
RIX · 9 km
1 h 40 m
€161-226
1 stop
ZAD · 10 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

MeasureRigaZadar
Official languageLatvianCroatian
CurrencyEuro (EUR)Euro (EUR)
SocketsCF230 V, 50 HzCF230 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideRightRight
Time zoneUTC+2, UTC+3 in summerUTC+1, UTC+2 in summer
Emergency number112112
Elevation6 m5 m
Main airportRiga International Airport (RIX)9 km from centre101 non-stop destinationsZadar Airport (ZAD)10 km from centre67 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year14 days

By the numbers

MeasureRigaZadar
City population588,91170,779
Museums within 10 km121
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km12
Distinct cuisines in the centre5517
Swim season, months above 21 °CNone4 months

Where else could you go?

Every comparison below shares a destination with this one, so you can follow Riga or Zadar 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). 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.