VacationSelector

Riga or Zagreb?

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 beaches & swimming and museums & heritage with your weighting.

Zagreb
47
match

Wins on nightlife 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.

RigaZagreb
Beaches & swimming. Riga leads by 40 points.40
RigaZagreb
Score400
Swim season months00
Beaches 10 km578
Coast distance12 km117 km
Water distance12 km
Places to eat. Riga leads by 7 points.7
RigaZagreb
Score5952
Restaurants within 2 km of centre470374
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km3327
Museums & heritage. Riga leads by 16 points.16
RigaZagreb
Score6145
Museums within 10 km6941
Museums within 2 km of centre4740
Share of museums within 2 km %6898
Unesco sites within 50 km10
Nightlife. Zagreb leads by 10 points.10
RigaZagreb
Score5161
Drinking venues within 4 km5841,009
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre456571
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %7857
Nightclubs within 4 km5463
Nature & day trips. Riga leads by 10 points.10
RigaZagreb
Score4434
Protected land share 50 km %109
Landscape blanket share 50 km %00
Land share of disc %73100
Park area within 2 km68 hectares52 hectares
Good for families. Riga leads by 7 points.7
RigaZagreb
Score3528
Tourist attractions within 2 km77
Park area within 2 km68 hectares52 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km10
Sights concentration. Riga leads by 2 points.2
RigaZagreb
Score6260
Notable places within 2 km137122
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Zagreb leads by 4 points.4
RigaZagreb
Score7680
Price level global53.748.5
Daily budget€132€138
Year-round weather. Zagreb leads by 10 points.10
RigaZagreb
Score5262
Monthly daytime high-0.1 °C to 23.5 °C5.4 °C to 28.5 °C
Monthly rainfall33 mm to 87 mm47 mm to 104 mm
Dry months30
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
Zagreb
5
8
13
18
23
27
29
28
22
17
11
6
Sea temperature, °C
Riga
2
1
1
3
9
14
18
19
16
11
8
5
Zagreb
No coastline within reach
Rainfall, mm
Riga
43
40
35
33
52
69
87
78
65
82
58
50
Zagreb
47
48
49
63
76
90
87
85
104
91
88
63
Daylight, hours per day
Riga
8
9
12
14
17
18
17
15
13
10
8
7
Zagreb
9
10
12
14
15
16
15
14
13
11
10
9
Sunshine, hours per day
Riga
No sunshine record
Zagreb
2
4
5
6
8
9
9
9
6
4
2
2

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. Riga: 1991-2020 normals, Riga (4.1 km from centre). Zagreb: 1991-2020 normals, Zagreb / Gric (0.6 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromRigaZagreb
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
2 h 40 m
no fares
RIX · 9 km
2 h 15 m
no fares
ZAG · 11 km
FrankfurtFRA, HHN
2 h 10 m
no fares
RIX · 9 km
1 h 30 m
no fares
ZAG · 11 km
IstanbulIST, SAW
2 h 45 m
no fares
RIX · 9 km
2 h 0 m
€153-254
ZAG · 11 km
AmsterdamAMS
2 h 15 m
no fares
RIX · 9 km
2 h 0 m
no fares
ZAG · 11 km
MunichMUC
2 h 10 m
no fares
RIX · 9 km
1 h 10 m
no fares
ZAG · 11 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
2 h 40 m
no fares
RIX · 9 km
1 h 55 m
no fares
ZAG · 11 km
ViennaVIE
2 h 0 m
no fares
RIX · 9 km
1 h 0 m
no fares
ZAG · 11 km
HelsinkiHEL
1 h 5 m
no fares
RIX · 9 km
2 h 40 m
no fares
LJU · 126 km
OsloOSL, TRF
1 h 40 m
no fares
RIX · 9 km
2 h 35 m
no fares
ZAG · 11 km
DubrovnikDBV
2 h 35 m
no fares
RIX · 9 km
1 h 10 m
no fares
ZAG · 11 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 2026-08 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

MeasureRigaZagreb
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 m127 m
Main airportRiga International Airport (RIX)9 km from centre101 non-stop destinationsZagreb Franjo Tuđman International Airport (ZAG)11 km from centre60 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year14 days

By the numbers

MeasureRigaZagreb
City population588,911767,131
Museums within 10 km1227
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km10
Distinct cuisines in the centre5542
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 Zagreb 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.