Athens and Santorini Among Europe’s Best for Last-minute Autumn Holidays

Santorini, Greece. Photo source: Unsplash.

Athens and Santorini are among the best destinations in Europe for a last-minute autumn holiday, according to a recent study by leading international provider of mobility services, SIXT.

To compile the list, SIXT experts collated a list of the 50 most popular cities in Europe from popular digital media platform Medium and ranked them based on average temperature, average days of rainfall, and average hours of daily sunshine, in the months of September, October and November.

In order to rank the destinations, they  gave each city a score out of 10 on each metric mentioned above before calculating a total out of 30.

Athens, Greece.

According to the research, Santorini is the best destination in Europe to catch autumn rays, with an average autumn temperature of 20.7°C and 11.8 hours of daily sunshine. Greece’s capital, Athens also ranked highly (3rd), with an average autumn temperature of 19.5°C and 11.5 hours of daily sunshine.

Seville, Spain ranked 2nd on the list with Lisbon and Dubrovnik rounding up the top 5.

SIXT’s top 10 European cities for last-minute autumn holidays are:

1. Santorini, Greece

2. Seville, Spain

3. Athens, Greece

4. Lisbon, Portugal

5. Dubrovnik, Croatia

6.Barcelona, Spain

7.Valencia, Spain

8.Rome, Italy

9. Nice, France

10. Dubrovnik, Croatia

SIXT, also published a list which ranked these European cities according to their average days of rainfall during September to November. Santorini once again topped the ranking with the least precipitation, however new cities entered the Top 10 list such as Bruges and Nuremberg.

1. Santorini, Greece – 4.7 average days of rainfall
2. Seville, Spain – 5 average days of rainfall
3. Barcelona, Spain – 5 average days of rainfall
4. Athens, Greece – 5.3 average days of rainfall
5. Bruges, Belgium – 6 average days of rainfall
6. Valencia, Spain – 7 average days of rainfall
7. Rome, Italy – 7.3 average days of rainfall
8. Split, Croatia – 7.3 average days of rainfall
9. Granada, Spain – 7.7 average days of rainfall
10. Nuremberg, Germany – 8 average days of rainfall

Overall, the company’s experts noted that these destinations not only boast mild weather but also thinner tourist crowds and travel packages with discounts on last-minute bookings.