VacationSelector

Rio de Janeiro or San Jose?

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

Your match

Rio de Janeiro
✓ Best match
69
match

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

San Jose
39
match

Wins on nature & day trips 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 JaneiroSan Jose
Beaches & swimming. Rio de Janeiro leads by 92 points.92
Rio de JaneiroSan Jose
Score1008
Swim season months120
Beaches 10 km611
Coast distance1 km14 km
Water distance1 km14 km
Places to eat. Rio de Janeiro leads by 13 points.13
Rio de JaneiroSan Jose
Score5441
Restaurants within 2 km of centre804313
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km1616
Museums & heritage. Rio de Janeiro leads by 43 points.43
Rio de JaneiroSan Jose
Score6926
Museums within 10 km11020
Museums within 2 km of centre519
Share of museums within 2 km %4645
Unesco sites within 50 km30
Nightlife. Rio de Janeiro leads by 26 points.26
Rio de JaneiroSan Jose
Score5731
Drinking venues within 4 km818231
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre50988
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %6238
Nightclubs within 4 km5016
Nature & day trips. San Jose leads by 8 points.8
Rio de JaneiroSan Jose
Score6270
Protected land share 50 km %2126
Landscape blanket share 50 km %172
Land share of disc %5791
Park area within 2 km113 hectares101 hectares
Good for families. Rio de Janeiro leads by 26 points.26
Rio de JaneiroSan Jose
Score5933
Tourist attractions within 2 km302
Park area within 2 km113 hectares101 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km12
Sights concentration. Rio de Janeiro leads by 42 points.42
Rio de JaneiroSan Jose
Score5614
Notable places within 2 km989
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Rio de Janeiro leads by 38 points.38
Rio de JaneiroSan Jose
Score8143
Price level global46.1100
Daily budget
Year-round weather. Rio de Janeiro and San Jose are level on 85.
Rio de JaneiroSan Jose
Score8585
Monthly daytime high24 °C to 28.4 °C15.4 °C to 26.8 °C
Monthly rainfall42 mm to 232 mm0 mm to 78 mm
Dry months08
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
San Jose
15
17
19
21
23
26
27
27
27
24
19
17
Sea temperature, °C
Rio de Janeiro
25
25
25
25
24
23
22
21
21
22
23
24
San Jose
12
12
12
12
12
13
14
15
15
14
13
13
Rainfall, mm
Rio de Janeiro
208
151
173
101
71
49
45
42
69
108
220
232
San Jose
50
78
51
25
9
2
0
0
2
15
33
62
Daylight, hours per day
Rio de Janeiro
13
13
12
12
11
11
11
11
12
13
13
14
San Jose
10
11
12
13
14
15
15
14
13
11
10
10

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. San Jose: 1991-2020 normals, San Jose / Santa Clara Trailer Village (8.2 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromRio de JaneiroSan Jose
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
9 h 45 m
€609-699
2 stops
GIG · 12 km
5 h 35 m
€286-328
1 stop
SFO · 57 km
TorontoYYZ, YHM, YTZ
10 h 25 m
no fares
GIG · 12 km
4 h 55 m
€339-541
1 stop
SFO · 57 km
DallasDFW, DAL, AFW
10 h 35 m
no fares
GIG · 12 km
3 h 25 m
no fares
SFO · 57 km
FrankfurtFRA, HHN
11 h 55 m
€915-1205
2 stops
GIG · 12 km
11 h 25 m
no fares
SFO · 57 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
11 h 30 m
€957-1014
2 stops
GIG · 12 km
11 h 15 m
no fares
SFO · 57 km
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
11 h 35 m
€996-1109
2 stops
GIG · 12 km
10 h 50 m
no fares
SFO · 57 km
DubaiDXB, DWC
14 h 40 m
€1,154-1306
GIG · 12 km
16 h 0 m
€1,005-1027
1 stop
SFO · 57 km
AtlantaATL, PDK
9 h 40 m
no fares
GIG · 12 km
4 h 40 m
no fares
SJC · 8 km
MadridMAD
10 h 15 m
€910-925
1 stop
GIG · 12 km
11 h 40 m
no fares
SFO · 57 km
AmsterdamAMS
11 h 55 m
€900-974
1 stop
GIG · 12 km
11 h 0 m
no fares
SFO · 57 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

MeasureRio de JaneiroSan Jose
Official languagePortuguese
CurrencyBrazilian Real (BRL)US Dollar (USD)
SocketsCN60 HzAB120 V, 60 Hz
Driving sideRightRight
Time zoneUTC-3UTC-8, UTC-7 in summer
Emergency numberPolice 190, ambulance 192, fire 193911
Elevation31 m25 m
Main airportRio de Janeiro Galeão – Tom Jobim International Airport (GIG)12 km from centre59 non-stop destinationsMineta San Jose International Airport (SJC)8 km from centre17 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year14 days13 days

By the numbers

MeasureRio de JaneiroSan Jose
City population6,211,2231,013,240
People per km²4,9302,167
Museums within 10 km7019
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km30
Distinct cuisines in the centre2730
Swim season, months above 21 °C12 monthsNone

Where else could you go?

Every comparison below shares a destination with this one, so you can follow Rio de Janeiro or San Jose 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. 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.