VacationSelector

Rio de Janeiro or Shanghai?

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.

Shanghai
54
match

Wins on 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 JaneiroShanghai
Beaches & swimming. Rio de Janeiro leads by 83 points.83
Rio de JaneiroShanghai
Score10017
Swim season months125
Beaches 10 km610
Coast distance1 km18 km
Water distance1 km18 km
Places to eatWe cannot measure this for Shanghai.
Museums & heritage. Rio de Janeiro leads by 24 points.24
Rio de JaneiroShanghai
Score6945
Museums within 10 km110108
Museums within 2 km of centre5128
Share of museums within 2 km %4626
Unesco sites within 50 km30
NightlifeWe cannot measure this for Shanghai.
Nature & day trips. Rio de Janeiro leads by 20 points.20
Rio de JaneiroShanghai
Score6242
Protected land share 50 km %219
Landscape blanket share 50 km %170
Land share of disc %5782
Park area within 2 km113 hectares83 hectares
Good for families. Shanghai leads by 22 points.22
Rio de JaneiroShanghai
Score5981
Tourist attractions within 2 km3086
Park area within 2 km113 hectares83 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km110
Sights concentration. Rio de Janeiro leads by 5 points.5
Rio de JaneiroShanghai
Score5651
Notable places within 2 km9873
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Rio de Janeiro leads by 2 points.2
Rio de JaneiroShanghai
Score8179
Price level global46.149
Daily budget
Year-round weather. Rio de Janeiro leads by 20 points.20
Rio de JaneiroShanghai
Score8565
Monthly daytime high24 °C to 28.4 °C8.5 °C to 33.2 °C
Monthly rainfall42 mm to 232 mm43 mm to 216 mm
Dry months00
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
Shanghai
9
11
15
21
26
28
33
33
29
23
18
12
Sea temperature, °C
Rio de Janeiro
25
25
25
25
24
23
22
21
21
22
23
24
Shanghai
8
7
10
14
19
22
26
28
26
21
17
12
Rainfall, mm
Rio de Janeiro
208
151
173
101
71
49
45
42
69
108
220
232
Shanghai
69
65
88
72
84
192
151
216
97
64
53
43
Daylight, hours per day
Rio de Janeiro
13
13
12
12
11
11
11
11
12
13
13
14
Shanghai
10
11
12
13
14
14
14
13
12
11
11
10
Sunshine, hours per day
Rio de Janeiro
No sunshine record
Shanghai
4
4
5
5
6
4
6
6
5
5
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. Shanghai: 1991-2020 normals, Shanghai / Hongqiao (8.1 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromRio de JaneiroShanghai
Buenos AiresEZE, AEP
3 h 0 m
€212-267
GIG · 12 km
23 h 45 m
€1,545-1873
2 stops
PVG · 33 km
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
9 h 45 m
€609-699
2 stops
GIG · 12 km
14 h 40 m
no fares
PVG · 33 km
TorontoYYZ, YHM, YTZ
10 h 25 m
no fares
GIG · 12 km
14 h 5 m
no fares
PVG · 33 km
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
11 h 35 m
€996-1109
2 stops
GIG · 12 km
11 h 30 m
€528-630
1 stop
PVG · 33 km
DubaiDXB, DWC
14 h 40 m
€1,154-1306
GIG · 12 km
8 h 15 m
€508-557
1 stop
PVG · 33 km
FrankfurtFRA, HHN
11 h 55 m
€915-1205
2 stops
GIG · 12 km
11 h 5 m
no fares
PVG · 33 km
MadridMAD
10 h 15 m
€910-925
1 stop
GIG · 12 km
12 h 45 m
no fares
PVG · 33 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
11 h 30 m
€957-1014
2 stops
GIG · 12 km
11 h 35 m
no fares
PVG · 33 km
AmsterdamAMS
11 h 55 m
€900-974
1 stop
GIG · 12 km
11 h 10 m
no fares
PVG · 33 km
LisbonLIS
9 h 45 m
€821-922
GIG · 12 km
13 h 20 m
no fares
HGH · 149 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 JaneiroShanghai
Official languagePortuguesePutonghua
CurrencyBrazilian Real (BRL)Yuan Renminbi (CNY)
SocketsCN60 HzACI220 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideRightRight
Time zoneUTC-3UTC+8
Emergency numberPolice 190, ambulance 192, fire 193Police 110, ambulance 120, fire 119
Elevation31 m4 m
Main airportRio de Janeiro Galeão – Tom Jobim International Airport (GIG)12 km from centre59 non-stop destinationsShanghai Pudong International Airport (PVG)33 km from centre200 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year14 days6 days

By the numbers

MeasureRio de JaneiroShanghai
City population6,211,22324,870,895
People per km²4,9303,922
Museums within 10 km7044
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km30
Distinct cuisines in the centre2764
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 Shanghai 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.