VacationSelector

Rio de Janeiro or Rome?

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

Your match

Rio de Janeiro
69
match

Wins on beaches & swimming and year-round weather with your weighting.

Rome
✓ Best match
72
match

Wins on sights concentration 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.

Rio de JaneiroRome
Beaches & swimming. Rio de Janeiro leads by 67 points.67
Rio de JaneiroRome
Score10033
Swim season months125
Beaches 10 km613
Coast distance1 km24 km
Water distance1 km24 km
Places to eat. Rome leads by 6 points.6
Rio de JaneiroRome
Score5460
Restaurants within 2 km of centre8042,241
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km1610
Museums & heritage. Rome leads by 15 points.15
Rio de JaneiroRome
Score6984
Museums within 10 km110161
Museums within 2 km of centre5179
Share of museums within 2 km %4649
Unesco sites within 50 km37
Nightlife. Rome leads by 17 points.17
Rio de JaneiroRome
Score5774
Drinking venues within 4 km8182,022
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre509912
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %6245
Nightclubs within 4 km5085
Nature & day trips. Rome leads by 8 points.8
Rio de JaneiroRome
Score6270
Protected land share 50 km %2119
Landscape blanket share 50 km %170
Land share of disc %5778
Park area within 2 km113 hectares172 hectares
Good for families. Rome leads by 27 points.27
Rio de JaneiroRome
Score5986
Tourist attractions within 2 km30126
Park area within 2 km113 hectares172 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km14
Sights concentration. Rome leads by 43 points.43
Rio de JaneiroRome
Score5699
Notable places within 2 km981,125
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Rio de Janeiro leads by 13 points.13
Rio de JaneiroRome
Score8168
Price level global46.164.9
Daily budget€155
Year-round weather. Rio de Janeiro leads by 14 points.14
Rio de JaneiroRome
Score8571
Monthly daytime high24 °C to 28.4 °C12 °C to 31.4 °C
Monthly rainfall42 mm to 232 mm21 mm to 114 mm
Dry months03
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
Rio de Janeiro
28
28
28
27
25
24
24
25
25
26
26
27
Rome
12
13
16
18
24
28
31
31
27
22
17
13
Sea temperature, °C
Rio de Janeiro
25
25
25
25
24
23
22
21
21
22
23
24
Rome
15
14
14
15
18
22
25
25
24
21
19
16
Rainfall, mm
Rio de Janeiro
208
151
173
101
71
49
45
42
69
108
220
232
Rome
67
69
57
75
62
33
21
38
70
97
114
103
Daylight, hours per day
Rio de Janeiro
13
13
12
12
11
11
11
11
12
13
13
14
Rome
10
11
12
13
15
15
15
14
13
11
10
9
Sunshine, hours per day
Rio de Janeiro
No sunshine record
Rome
4
5
6
7
9
10
11
11
8
6
4
4

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. Rio de Janeiro: 2001-2020 normals, NASA POWER reanalysis grid, no weather station within 90 km. Rome: 1991-2020 normals, Roma / Ciampino (15.1 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromRio de JaneiroRome
Sao PauloGRU, VCP, CGH, RTE
1 h 5 m
€113-134
GIG · 12 km
11 h 45 m
€893-1016
1 stop
FCO · 23 km
Buenos AiresEZE, AEP
3 h 0 m
€212-267
GIG · 12 km
13 h 45 m
no fares
FCO · 23 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
11 h 30 m
€957-1014
2 stops
GIG · 12 km
2 h 0 m
€91-122
FCO · 23 km
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
9 h 45 m
€609-699
2 stops
GIG · 12 km
8 h 45 m
€446-597
FCO · 23 km
MadridMAD
10 h 15 m
€910-925
1 stop
GIG · 12 km
2 h 15 m
€98-119
FCO · 23 km
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
11 h 35 m
€996-1109
2 stops
GIG · 12 km
2 h 20 m
€76-143
1 stop
FCO · 23 km
TorontoYYZ, YHM, YTZ
10 h 25 m
no fares
GIG · 12 km
9 h 0 m
€487-550
1 stop
FCO · 23 km
AmsterdamAMS
11 h 55 m
€900-974
1 stop
GIG · 12 km
2 h 10 m
€176-218
FCO · 23 km
LisbonLIS
9 h 45 m
€821-922
GIG · 12 km
2 h 50 m
€91-168
FCO · 23 km
DubaiDXB, DWC
14 h 40 m
€1,154-1306
GIG · 12 km
5 h 45 m
€270-340
FCO · 23 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

MeasureRio de JaneiroRome
Official languagePortugueseItalian
CurrencyBrazilian Real (BRL)Euro (EUR)
SocketsCN60 HzCFL230 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideRightRight
Time zoneUTC-3UTC+1, UTC+2 in summer
Emergency numberPolice 190, ambulance 192, fire 193112
Elevation31 m21 m
Main airportRio de Janeiro Galeão – Tom Jobim International Airport (GIG)12 km from centre59 non-stop destinationsRome–Fiumicino Leonardo da Vinci International Airport (FCO)23 km from centre230 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year14 days13 days

By the numbers

MeasureRio de JaneiroRome
City population6,211,2232,748,109
People per km²4,9302,135
Museums within 10 km70177
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km37
Distinct cuisines in the centre2765
Swim season, months above 21 °C12 months5 months

Where else could you go?

Every comparison below shares a destination with this one, so you can follow Rio de Janeiro or Rome 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). Temperature and rainfall for destinations with no weather station are from the NASA POWER 2001-2020 climatology, derived from MERRA-2. 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). 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. Tourism statistics from Eurostat, © European Union, reused under CC BY 4.0. 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.