How Visit by Month works
What our numbers mean and where they come from.
What this site answers
Most travel advice tells you the best time to visit a place. That is the wrong shape of question when your dates are already fixed, or when you care more about price than perfect weather. Every destination here is broken into twelve monthly profiles so you can compare the same place across the year, or compare places within one month.
The four signals
Average daytime high, nighttime low and a 0–100 wetness index, based on long-run climate normals rather than any single year.
A 0–100 demand index reflecting school holidays, festival peaks and typical visitor volume at the destination, not at one hotel.
A 0–100 relative index plus a $ / $$ / $$$ tier, showing how expensive a month is compared with that destination’s own cheapest and priciest months.
Recurring festivals, holidays and natural events that reliably fall in a given month and change how a place feels.
Rainfall, sea temperature and daylight
Rainfall in millimetres and the number of rainy days are the climate normals that each country's national weather service reports for its own station, taken from the World Meteorological Organization's World Weather Information Service (worldweather.wmo.int). The reference period is the one that service has filed, most often 1981–2010 or 1971–2000, sometimes 1961–1990 or 1991–2020, with an older or longer series for a few stations, and each service applies its own threshold for what counts as a rainy day. When a destination is a whole island or region, the figures come from one station there and the page names it. Where no station reports within 30 km of a destination, we show no rainfall figure rather than guess one. Sea temperature is the 1991–2020 average of NOAA's daily sea surface temperature analysis for the nearest open water, so a sheltered bay can be a little warmer in summer. Daylight is the time between sunrise and sunset in the middle of the month, worked out from the latitude.
How the score is calculated
The 0–100 score blends the signals above: 45% weather comfort (peaking near 24 °C and penalising heavy rain), 25% room to breathe (the inverse of crowding) and 30% value (the inverse of price). It is a starting point for comparison, not a verdict — a 60 in a month you can actually travel beats an 85 you cannot.
What these numbers are not
They are climate normals and modelled estimates, not a forecast. A month that is normally dry can still rain on your week. Prices move with fuel costs, exchange rates and events. Treat everything here as a planning guide, check conditions close to departure, and never book around a single number.
Fact, estimate, recommendation
We keep the three separate on purpose. Temperatures and event dates are facts. Crowd and price indices are estimates. Ratings, scores and "best months" are recommendations derived from the first two. Where a figure is sensitive or changes often, we show when it was last reviewed.
Corrections
Seasons shift, festivals move and destinations change their rules. If something here is wrong or out of date, we would rather know — corrections are applied to the underlying data so every page that uses it is fixed at once.
Languages
The factual database is single-source. Interface, slugs, metadata and written guidance are localised into English, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian and French, so no language gets a thinner version of the same answer.
All destinations
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