VacationSelector

Sydney or Valencia?

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

Your match

Too close to call, level with your weighting

Sydney
64
match

Wins on good for families and sights concentration with your weighting.

Valencia
64
match

Wins on value for money and beaches & swimming 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.

SydneyValencia
Beaches & swimming. Valencia leads by 7 points.7
SydneyValencia
Score6067
Swim season months65
Beaches 10 km16012
Coast distance7 km3 km
Water distance7 km3 km
Places to eat. Sydney and Valencia are level on 78.
SydneyValencia
Score7878
Restaurants within 2 km of centre2,2051,995
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km3133
Museums & heritage. Valencia leads by 4 points.4
SydneyValencia
Score5155
Museums within 10 km4459
Museums within 2 km of centre2026
Share of museums within 2 km %4544
Unesco sites within 50 km22
Nightlife. Sydney leads by 5 points.5
SydneyValencia
Score7570
Drinking venues within 4 km2,0501,513
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre1,405957
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %6963
Nightclubs within 4 km120108
Nature & day trips. Sydney leads by 5 points.5
SydneyValencia
Score5853
Protected land share 50 km %1010
Landscape blanket share 50 km %00
Land share of disc %5264
Park area within 2 km115 hectares119 hectares
Good for families. Sydney leads by 22 points.22
SydneyValencia
Score6442
Tourist attractions within 2 km3712
Park area within 2 km115 hectares119 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km20
Sights concentration. Sydney leads by 8 points.8
SydneyValencia
Score6052
Notable places within 2 km12378
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Valencia leads by 21 points.21
SydneyValencia
Score5071
Price level global90.260.8
Daily budget—€122
Year-round weather. Valencia leads by 3 points.3
SydneyValencia
Score8184
Monthly daytime high17.7 °C to 27.7 °C16.8 °C to 30.6 °C
Monthly rainfall55 mm to 121 mm7 mm to 70 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
Sydney
28
27
26
23
21
18
18
19
22
24
25
26
Valencia
17
17
19
21
24
28
30
31
28
25
20
17
Sea temperature, °C
Sydney
23
23
23
22
21
20
19
18
18
19
20
21
Valencia
14
14
14
16
18
22
25
26
25
22
19
16
Rainfall, mm
Sydney
80
116
90
95
89
121
70
63
57
55
71
68
Valencia
38
30
40
33
36
26
7
15
70
66
52
48
Daylight, hours per day
Sydney
14
13
12
11
10
10
10
11
12
13
14
14
Valencia
10
11
12
13
14
15
15
14
13
11
10
9
Sunshine, hours per day
Sydney
8
6
7
7
7
6
7
8
8
8
7
8
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. Sydney: 1991-2020 normals, Sydney Airport (3.7 km from centre). Valencia: 1991-2020 normals, Valencia (1.6 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromSydneyValencia
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
20 h 40 m
€931-1073
1 stop
SYD · 9 km
2 h 15 m
€80-167
VLC · 9 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
20 h 35 m
no fares
SYD · 9 km
1 h 55 m
€103-131
VLC · 9 km
RomeFCO, CIA
19 h 55 m
no fares
SYD · 9 km
2 h 0 m
€70-117
VLC · 9 km
IstanbulIST, SAW
18 h 15 m
no fares
SYD · 9 km
3 h 35 m
€167-378
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 2026-08 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

MeasureSydneyValencia
Official languageEnglishSpanish
CurrencyAustralian Dollar (AUD)Euro (EUR)
SocketsI230 V, 50 HzCF230 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideLeftRight
Time zoneUTC+10, UTC+11 in summerUTC+1, UTC+2 in summer
Emergency number000112
Elevation6 m15 m
Main airportSydney Kingsford Smith International Airport (SYD)9 km from centre94 non-stop destinationsValencia Airport (VLC)9 km from centre107 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year11 days13 days

By the numbers

MeasureSydneyValencia
City population5,450,496840,792
People per km²4496,242
Museums within 10 km3846
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km22
Distinct cuisines in the centre7992
Swim season, months above 21 °C6 months5 months

Where else could you go?

Every comparison below shares a destination with this one, so you can follow Sydney 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. 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.