The basket
To compare cities honestly you need the same basket everywhere: one museum entry, one ticket to a performance, two drinks, a mid-range dinner and a return transport fare. That is the calculation behind the Culture Budget tool, and the spread it produces is larger than most people expect.
The cheap end
Mexico City is the outlier: world-class museums for a few euros, theatre for under twenty and dinner for the price of two drinks in Copenhagen. Lisbon is the best value in western Europe, and Seoul combines free national museums with a metro fare of about a euro.
The expensive end
New York leads by a distance, mostly because of theatre prices and the cost of a drink. Copenhagen follows: the museums are reasonable, everything consumed is not. London is the strangest case in this guide, with the best free museums in the world and the most expensive tickets in Europe in the same square mile.
Where the money actually goes
Not on admission. In almost every city, dinner and drinks cost more than everything cultural you did that day. A visitor who eats at food halls and markets and spends the savings on a better seat will have a better trip for the same money.
The free layer
Eleven of the thirty-two festivals in this guide are free in some meaningful form, every commercial gallery in every city is free, the British national collections are free and several museums have free evenings each month. A carefully planned week of culture can cost almost nothing.
