BRITS dreaming of a life in the sun might want to sit down for this one: even Brighton, officially the sunniest city in the UK, can’t get close to Porto — the cloudiest major city on the Iberian Peninsula.
New analysis from climate-data platform GeoRank, which compares satellite sunshine readings against a network of 182 ground weather stations, puts Brighton on 1,647 hours of sunshine a year.
Porto, by contrast, notches up 2,270 hours — despite its reputation as the rainy corner of Iberia.
That’s a gap of more than 600 hours between the best Britain has to offer and the worst Spain and Portugal have to offer.
There were ten Spanish and two Portuguese cities in the top 20.
The news gets worse for anyone clinging to dreams of a sunny life in the UK though. Bournemouth trails behind Brighton on 1,604 hours, while London limps in at just 1,410 — barely half of what’s on offer in southern Spain.
Head to the Costa Blanca or Costa del Sol, though, and the numbers flip dramatically.
Alicante racks up 2,805 hours of sunshine a year, with Sevilla topping the charts among the group at 2,974 and Malaga close behind on 2,936.
Even in January — peak misery season back home — Alicante sees six hours of sunshine a day, compared with Brighton’s two.
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And it’s not just the weather that favours Spain. According to cost-of-living website Numbeo, a single person can expect to spend around €1,280 (£1,097 ) a month in Alicante, against £1,826 (€2,131) in Brighton — a saving of roughly 40%, for three times the January sunshine.
Malaga, a magnet for British buyers, comes in at €1,495 (£1,280) a month with 2,936 hours of sun a year — still dramatically cheaper than London’s £2,563 (€2,992), and with over twice the sunshine hours to boot.
Lisbon, cloudier than its Spanish neighbours at 2,781 hours, still comfortably beats anything on the British list.
GeoRank says its figures are bias-corrected against ground stations precisely because raw satellite reanalysis tends to overstate sunshine hours in cloudier regions by as much as 73% — a caveat worth bearing in mind next time a ‘sunniest city’ ranking does the rounds.
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