VacationSelector

Sao Paulo or Valencia?

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

Your match

Sao Paulo
56
match

Wins on good for families and value for money with your weighting.

Valencia
✓ Best match
64
match

Wins on beaches & swimming and museums & heritage 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.

Sao PauloValencia
Beaches & swimming. Valencia leads by 67 points.67
Sao PauloValencia
Score067
Swim season months05
Beaches 10 km012
Coast distance51 km3 km
Water distance3 km
Places to eat. Valencia leads by 5 points.5
Sao PauloValencia
Score7378
Restaurants within 2 km of centre1,7351,995
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km2733
Museums & heritage. Valencia leads by 12 points.12
Sao PauloValencia
Score4355
Museums within 10 km8259
Museums within 2 km of centre2626
Share of museums within 2 km %3244
Unesco sites within 50 km02
Nightlife. Sao Paulo leads by 2 points.2
Sao PauloValencia
Score7270
Drinking venues within 4 km1,7471,513
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre896957
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %5163
Nightclubs within 4 km118108
Nature & day trips. Valencia leads by 2 points.2
Sao PauloValencia
Score5153
Protected land share 50 km %2610
Landscape blanket share 50 km %150
Land share of disc %9564
Park area within 2 km52 hectares119 hectares
Good for families. Sao Paulo leads by 13 points.13
Sao PauloValencia
Score5542
Tourist attractions within 2 km3812
Park area within 2 km52 hectares119 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km10
Sights concentration. Valencia leads by 2 points.2
Sao PauloValencia
Score5052
Notable places within 2 km6878
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Sao Paulo leads by 10 points.10
Sao PauloValencia
Score8171
Price level global46.160.8
Daily budget€122
Year-round weather. Valencia leads by 1 points.1
Sao PauloValencia
Score8384
Monthly daytime high22.8 °C to 29.2 °C16.8 °C to 30.6 °C
Monthly rainfall26 mm to 297 mm7 mm to 70 mm
Dry months18
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
Sao Paulo
28
29
28
27
24
23
23
25
25
27
27
28
Valencia
17
17
19
21
24
28
30
31
28
25
20
17
Sea temperature, °C
Sao Paulo
No coastline within reach
Valencia
14
14
14
16
18
22
25
26
25
22
19
16
Rainfall, mm
Sao Paulo
297
259
206
89
64
55
53
26
82
128
146
234
Valencia
38
30
40
33
36
26
7
15
70
66
52
48
Daylight, hours per day
Sao Paulo
13
13
12
12
11
11
11
11
12
13
13
14
Valencia
10
11
12
13
14
15
15
14
13
11
10
9
Sunshine, hours per day
Sao Paulo
4
6
6
5
5
5
6
6
5
6
5
5
Valencia
6
6
7
8
9
9
10
10
8
7
6
5

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. Sao Paulo: 1991-2020 normals, Sao Paulo (5.9 km from centre). Valencia: 1991-2020 normals, Valencia (1.6 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromSao PauloValencia
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
11 h 50 m
no fares
GRU · 21 km
2 h 15 m
€80-167
VLC · 9 km
MadridMAD
10 h 30 m
€739-741
GRU · 21 km
1 h 0 m
€69-81
VLC · 9 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
11 h 45 m
no fares
GRU · 21 km
1 h 55 m
€103-131
VLC · 9 km
AmsterdamAMS
12 h 10 m
no fares
GRU · 21 km
2 h 25 m
€155-178
VLC · 9 km
RomeFCO, CIA
11 h 45 m
no fares
GRU · 21 km
2 h 0 m
€70-117
VLC · 9 km
MilanMXP, BGY, LIN
11 h 50 m
no fares
GRU · 21 km
1 h 50 m
€51-87
VLC · 9 km
BrusselsBRU, CRL
12 h 0 m
no fares
GRU · 21 km
2 h 15 m
€110-139
VLC · 9 km
ZurichZRH
12 h 0 m
no fares
GRU · 21 km
2 h 0 m
€151-206
1 stop
VLC · 9 km
FrankfurtFRA, HHN
12 h 10 m
no fares
GRU · 21 km
2 h 15 m
€128-199
1 stop
VLC · 9 km
MontrealYUL, YHU, YMX
10 h 15 m
no fares
GRU · 21 km
7 h 30 m
no fares
VLC · 9 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

MeasureSao PauloValencia
Official languagePortugueseSpanish
CurrencyBrazilian Real (BRL)Euro (EUR)
SocketsCN60 HzCF230 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideRightRight
Time zoneUTC-3UTC+1, UTC+2 in summer
Emergency numberPolice 190, ambulance 192, fire 193112
Elevation760 m15 m
Main airportSão Paulo/Guarulhos–Governor André Franco Montoro International Airport (GRU)21 km from centre102 non-stop destinationsValencia Airport (VLC)9 km from centre107 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year15 days13 days

By the numbers

MeasureSao PauloValencia
City population11,451,999840,792
People per km²7,5196,242
Museums within 10 km9046
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km02
Distinct cuisines in the centre5992
Swim season, months above 21 °C5 months

Where else could you go?

Every comparison below shares a destination with this one, so you can follow Sao Paulo or Valencia 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. 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. Sea surface temperature from NOAA OISST v2.1, NOAA Physical Sciences Laboratory. 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.