VacationSelector

Rio de Janeiro or Sofia?

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 year-round weather with your weighting.

Sofia
56
match

Wins on value for money and places to eat 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 JaneiroSofia
Beaches & swimming. Rio de Janeiro leads by 100 points.100
Rio de JaneiroSofia
Score1000
Swim season months120
Beaches 10 km610
Coast distance1 km214 km
Water distance1 km
Places to eat. Sofia leads by 10 points.10
Rio de JaneiroSofia
Score5464
Restaurants within 2 km of centre804845
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km1628
Museums & heritage. Rio de Janeiro leads by 12 points.12
Rio de JaneiroSofia
Score6957
Museums within 10 km11051
Museums within 2 km of centre5140
Share of museums within 2 km %4678
Unesco sites within 50 km31
Nightlife. Sofia leads by 4 points.4
Rio de JaneiroSofia
Score5761
Drinking venues within 4 km818958
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre509608
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %6263
Nightclubs within 4 km50102
Nature & day trips. Rio de Janeiro leads by 11 points.11
Rio de JaneiroSofia
Score6251
Protected land share 50 km %2112
Landscape blanket share 50 km %174
Land share of disc %57100
Park area within 2 km113 hectares229 hectares
Good for families. Rio de Janeiro leads by 4 points.4
Rio de JaneiroSofia
Score5955
Tourist attractions within 2 km3020
Park area within 2 km113 hectares229 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km10
Sights concentration. Sofia leads by 1 points.1
Rio de JaneiroSofia
Score5657
Notable places within 2 km98104
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Sofia leads by 18 points.18
Rio de JaneiroSofia
Score8199
Price level global46.121.4
Daily budget€77
Year-round weather. Rio de Janeiro leads by 21 points.21
Rio de JaneiroSofia
Score8564
Monthly daytime high24 °C to 28.4 °C3.5 °C to 28.4 °C
Monthly rainfall42 mm to 232 mm36 mm to 78 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
Sofia
4
7
11
17
21
25
28
28
23
18
11
5
Sea temperature, °C
Rio de Janeiro
25
25
25
25
24
23
22
21
21
22
23
24
Sofia
No coastline within reach
Rainfall, mm
Rio de Janeiro
208
151
173
101
71
49
45
42
69
108
220
232
Sofia
36
36
45
52
73
78
64
56
54
56
38
41
Daylight, hours per day
Rio de Janeiro
13
13
12
12
11
11
11
11
12
13
13
14
Sofia
9
11
12
13
15
15
15
14
13
11
10
9
Sunshine, hours per day
Rio de Janeiro
No sunshine record
Sofia
3
4
6
6
8
9
10
10
7
5
3
2

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. Sofia: 1991-2020 normals, Sofia Observ. (7.3 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromRio de JaneiroSofia
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
11 h 35 m
€996-1109
2 stops
GIG · 12 km
3 h 5 m
€70-85
1 stop
SOF · 8 km
FrankfurtFRA, HHN
11 h 55 m
€915-1205
2 stops
GIG · 12 km
2 h 20 m
€130-210
1 stop
SOF · 8 km
RomeFCO, CIA
11 h 25 m
€897-908
GIG · 12 km
1 h 45 m
€55-68
SOF · 8 km
MadridMAD
10 h 15 m
€910-925
1 stop
GIG · 12 km
3 h 20 m
€114-128
SOF · 8 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
11 h 30 m
€957-1014
2 stops
GIG · 12 km
2 h 45 m
€99-135
1 stop
SOF · 8 km
DubaiDXB, DWC
14 h 40 m
€1,154-1306
GIG · 12 km
4 h 45 m
€298-357
1 stop
SOF · 8 km
AmsterdamAMS
11 h 55 m
€900-974
1 stop
GIG · 12 km
2 h 45 m
no fares
SOF · 8 km
LisbonLIS
9 h 45 m
€821-922
GIG · 12 km
3 h 55 m
no fares
SOF · 8 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 JaneiroSofia
Official languagePortugueseBulgarian
CurrencyBrazilian Real (BRL)Euro (EUR)
SocketsCN60 HzCF230 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideRightRight
Time zoneUTC-3UTC+2, UTC+3 in summer
Emergency numberPolice 190, ambulance 192, fire 193112
Elevation31 m560 m
Main airportRio de Janeiro Galeão – Tom Jobim International Airport (GIG)12 km from centre59 non-stop destinationsSofia Airport (SOF)8 km from centre94 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year14 days15 days

By the numbers

MeasureRio de JaneiroSofia
City population6,211,2231,213,134
People per km²4,9302,466
Museums within 10 km7042
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km31
Distinct cuisines in the centre2751
Swim season, months above 21 °C12 months

Where else could you go?

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