Same air-temperature band as the warm list, plus a sea of at least 22 °C. That single condition removes the Canaries, Madeira and Cape Town for most of the northern winter: all three are pleasantly warm and none of them are swimming.
Right now · September
30.7 °C by day and 2 mm of rain. About as good as this month gets.
Central Mediterranean, warm and dry from June to October, and routinely mis-sold as winter sun.
COZZO SPADARO, 103 km away · Malta Met Office / WMO CLINO · 1991–2020 · 14 of 30 years · Checked 2026-08-12
29.3 °C by day and 1 mm of rain. About as good as this month gets.
The southernmost of the big Greek islands, with a swimming season that runs a month longer at both ends.
HERAKLION · HNMS / WMO CLINO · 1991–2020 · 11 of 30 years · Checked 2026-08-12
31 °C by day and 24 mm of rain. About as good as this month gets.
The Adriatic coast: a short, reliable summer and a sea that stays warm well into September.
SPLIT MARJAN · DHMZ / WMO CLINO · 1991–2020 · Checked 2026-08-12
28.8 °C by day and 0 mm of rain. About as good as this month gets.
Subtropical Atlantic, 100 km off the Sahara: warm every month of the year, and washed by a current that never warms up with it.
STA. CRUZ DE TENERIFE · AEMET · 1991–2020 · Checked 2026-08-12
25.2 °C by day — warm, without being the warmest thing on the list.
An Atlantic island with almost no seasons: the difference between its coolest and warmest month is under 8 °C.
FUNCHAL/S.CATARINA · IPMA · 1991–2020 · 19 of 30 years · Checked 2026-08-12
The air is fine at 31 °C. The sea is 21.9 °C, which is not a swim.
Mainland Spain's warmest winter coast — mild rather than hot, and a genuinely cold sea until June.
The water is below 22 °C, the point most northern-European swimmers stop calling it swimming. Fine for a walk on the beach; a shock in it.
MALAGA AEROPUERTO · AEMET · 1991–2020 · Checked 2026-08-12
We show at most two places per country so one country cannot fill the list.
A ranking that will not show its criteria is an opinion. These are ours.
Warm days mean a mean daily maximum of 25–33 °C, scoring nothing below 20 °C or above 36 °C. The upper bound is not a formality: Dubai in July is 41 °C, and a list that treats hotter as better puts it first.
Swimmable means a sea of at least 22 °C. There is no meteorological standard for this — it is the convention northern-European travel publishers use, and we are telling you so rather than implying otherwise.
The criteria multiply rather than add, so a perfect air temperature cannot compensate for a cold sea. That is the whole reason the warm list and the swimming list are two separate lists.
Snow reliability is classified against the 100-day rule (Abegg 1996, after Föhn 1990): snow-reliable means at least 30 cm of cover on at least 100 days between 1 December and 15 April, in seven winters out of ten, with the line at about 1,200 m in the Swiss Alps. We classify against that rule and cite it; we do not compute it, because no free dataset carries per-resort snow depth.
Aurora is ranked on corrected geomagnetic latitude, not geographic latitude, and on median winter cloud. The oval sits at roughly 65–70° geomagnetic and moves about 2° equatorward per unit of Kp.
Tropical-cyclone seasons are applied separately from rainfall. A peak month is excluded outright; a shoulder month is capped no matter how dry it is.
Temperature and rainfall are 1991–2020 monthly normals computed from NOAA's Global Historical Climatology Network station records — the station used for each destination is named on its card, along with how far away it is. Sea-surface temperature comes from NOAA OISST v2.1 over the same period. Rain days count days with at least 2.5 mm.
These are thirty-year averages, not a forecast. They tell you what a month is usually like, never what next Tuesday will be.
Almost always the sea. The Canaries in January are 21 °C in the air and 19 °C in the water — a genuine answer to "somewhere warm" and a bad answer to "somewhere I can swim". Rather than pick one meaning and be wrong for half of you, we run two lists.
Because for about half of these places the town temperature is the wrong number. Chamonix's valley sits at 1,035 m and is often green in January while its lifts reach 3,842 m. The elevation pair tells you what you actually need to know; a valley temperature would just mislead you confidently.
December has the most hours of darkness and the worst odds per hour. Geomagnetic activity peaks around the equinoxes — the Russell–McPherron effect — so March and September–October are roughly twice as likely to deliver. If you can only travel in December you will still see them; you will just need more nights.
No. Every number here is a 1991–2020 average from a named weather station. They describe what a month is usually like. For the next two weeks, use a forecast.
Usually because there is no weather station near it with a long enough record, and we would rather leave a place out than publish a number measured 400 km away. Palawan is out for exactly that reason.
Otherwise January's warm list is eight Spanish islands. The cap is applied after ranking, so it never changes which place is better — only how many of one country's you see at once.
Take the destination and the month straight into the packing calculator — it will use the real forecast when you get close enough for one.