Warm Places in Europe in December: The 10 Warmest Cities, Ranked

Warmest European cities in December, ranked

Ranked by daytime high — the peak afternoon temperature, which is what every competitor site actually means when it quotes a single number for a month. GeoRank's daytime high uses a native ~1 km CHELSA maximum-temperature grid with an ERA5 warming-trend uplift, calibrated to 2011–2025. The monthly mean is shown alongside it as a clearly separate, colder number so the two are never confused. See the full temperature map for every city, not just the ten below.

Which country is warmest — Spain, Cyprus or Malta?

By country, Spain wins outright — but only if the Canary Islands count. Las Palmas (19.9°C) and Santa Cruz de Tenerife (19.7°C) are the two warmest cities in this whole ranking, averaging 19.8°C between them. Mainland Spain is a different climate entirely: Alicante's daytime high is 16.7°C, cooler than every Cypriot city here. See how the month compares across the rest of the season in the five-month winter matrix.

Cyprus is the most consistent performer rather than the single warmest. All four tracked cities — Larnaca, Limassol, Paphos, Nicosia — sit within 0.7°C of each other and average 17.6°C, with Larnaca leading at 17.9°C. Malta is the tightest cluster of all: Sliema and Valletta both average 17.1°C, separated by nothing more than measurement noise. If the question is "warmest single city," the Canaries win by two clear degrees. If it's "most reliably warm across an entire country," Cyprus is the safer bet.

Rain is the December variable, not temperature

Paphos and Limassol are separated by just 0.1°C on daytime high — 17.5°C versus 17.6°C, effectively the same city on a thermometer. But Paphos gets 129 mm of December rain to Limassol's 98 mm, a 32% difference that no temperature figure captures. It shows up directly in outdoor-comfort hours: Limassol logs 240 comfortable hours in December against Paphos's 226, a gap driven almost entirely by rain, not heat. See the pattern city by city on the world rainfall map.

Alicante makes the opposite case. At 16.7°C it's the coolest city in the Spanish rows of this ranking, but its 24 mm of December rain is the driest figure on the entire table — less than a fifth of Paphos's total. A traveler optimizing purely for warmth would skip Alicante; one optimizing for dry, comfortable days outside might not. That's the whole argument for publishing rainfall alongside temperature instead of a single warmth number, and it's the reason GeoRank tracks an outdoor-comfort hours figure for every city rather than temperature alone.

Canary Islands vs Cyprus vs Malta, head to head

Averaged across the cities tracked in this ranking, the three destinations split cleanly on temperature, rain, and sunshine — no single one wins on every axis.

The Canaries win on every column — warmer, drier, sunnier, and more outdoor-comfortable. Cyprus is the closer second than the temperature gap alone suggests. Malta trails on outdoor hours specifically: 136 versus Cyprus's 233, a gap driven by both higher rainfall and lower December sunshine, not by temperature — Malta's daytime high is within half a degree of Cyprus's.

How we measure this — and why our numbers are lower

Two different datasets feed this page, and they cover different time periods. The daytime high column — the headline figure — comes from a native ~1 km CHELSA maximum-temperature grid with an ERA5 warming-trend uplift, calibrated against 2011–2025 normals. The monthly mean, sunshine, and rainfall columns use CHELSA v2.1 and SARAH-3 satellite sunshine data on the standard 1991–2020 climatology. We label each column separately rather than stamping the whole table with one date range, because doing otherwise would misrepresent either figure.

Some December guides list Gran Canaria at 22°C or Paphos at 20°C — single numbers, unsourced, and higher than what GeoRank publishes. Our calibrated daytime highs for the same two cities are 19.9°C and 17.5°C. The gap isn't an error; it's the difference between a quoted, rounded figure and a grid-computed value corrected for a real 15-year warming trend. Being lower and traceable to a named dataset beats being higher and unsourced — full detail, including the correction formula, is on the methodology page.

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