Best Time to Visit the Guggenheim Museums, Month by Month

The best time to visit the Guggenheim museums depends on the city, because the buildings are indoors and the weather around them is what changes. For New York choose April, May, September or October. For Bilbao and San Sebastián choose May, June or September. For Venice choose April, May or September, and treat November as the month when the lagoon is most likely to flood. Abu Dhabi, scheduled to open on 11 December 2026, is a November to March destination. This page gives the 1991-2020 climate normals behind those calls, so you can overrule us.

The museum is open in every month. What you are choosing is how the walk to it feels: a quarter-mile ramp in January wind, a rainy November in the Basque Country, a lagoon at high tide. Pick the city first, then the month.

We used three inputs and kept them separate. First, temperature: a high between roughly 60 and 77 °F (16 to 25 °C) is comfortable for walking between a station and a front door. Second, rain: both the millimeters and the number of wet days, because ten drizzly days feel different from four downpours. Third, where a public series exists, how full the city is. That last input exists only for Bilbao and San Sebastián. For the other cities we say so rather than guess.

The ranking measures the trip, not the museum. A gallery stays dry in every month. If you are flying in for a single building and plan to be inside most of the day, move every "Good" month up a notch and decide on price and crowds instead. Our guide to which Guggenheim to visit covers that choice.

April, May, September and October. Average highs climb from 62 °F in April to 71 °F in May, fall back to 76 °F in September and 65 °F in October, and snow has all but gone: 0.2 days in April, none from May to October.

Summer is workable but hot. July averages 85 °F for the high and 70 °F for the low, and it is also the wettest month at 117 mm (4.6 inches). The surprise is how little the rain varies. Every month brings between 9 and 12 days of measurable precipitation, and September is the lightest at 8.8 days. There is no dry season to wait for.

Winter is the hard part. In January the average high is 40 °F and the low 28 °F, with 3.7 snow days and 22 cm (about 9 inches) of snow; February adds 3.2 snow days and 26 cm. The building rewards a coat you can take off: there is a free coat check, and the ramp is a quarter mile long. What to wear, month by month, is on our what to bring page.

The museum itself offers a hint about the weather. Its visitor tips page recommends dressing in layers in summer because the temperature inside is fairly cool. So a Bilbao July can mean a warm walk along the river and a sweater indoors.

If you are adding a Basque day trip, plan around the rain. Hondarribia-Malkarroa, a coastal weather station about 15 km east that we use as a proxy for the seafront, records 1,684 mm a year. Igueldo, the station on the hill above the city (251 m), records 1,566 mm. Bilbao gets 1,155 mm. The driest month, July, still has 90 mm of rain on the coast, well above Bilbao's 52 mm.

That is why we put only June and September in the top tier. Highs reach 73 °F in June and 74 °F in September, with 10 wet days in each month. On the coast, expect August highs of 77 °F. Igueldo, the hill station, shows a cooler 73 °F in August. For tours that combine the museum with the Basque coast, see our Basque Country day trips.

April, May and September are the sweet spot: highs of 63, 72 and 75 °F, 6 to 8 wet days a month, and 174 to 229 hours of sun in spring. Summer is hot and bright. July averages an 83 °F high and 288 hours of sunshine, the most of any month. Winter is cold rather than snowy, with a January low of 32 °F and a high of 46 °F, and only 78 to 81 hours of sun in December and January. Venice is also the driest of the four cities with a rain table here, at about 760 mm a year.

The Venice numbers come with a caveat we should state plainly. We could not retrieve the station table from the Italian environment agency, ISPRA, so these normals are secondary: they come from the climate box on the Venice article of Wikipedia, which cites ISPRA's 1991-2020 values. The World Meteorological Organization package we used for the other cities does not include Venice. Treat Venice figures as good to a degree or two and a few millimeters.

Acqua alta is the Italian term for high water. The city counts an event from 110 cm above the tidal datum at the Punta della Salute tide gauge. The Comune di Venezia tide office tabulated 296 events at or above that level between 1872 and 2018. We counted them by month from its table.

They are strongly seasonal. October to December hold 71% of all events, and November alone 31%; adding January brings it to 80%. The monthly counts from January run 28, 32, 11, 7, 4, 2, 0, 0, 2, 45, 93 and 72. July and August have zero in the whole 1872-2018 table. ISPRA reported that on 28 August 2023 the sea off Venice passed 110 cm at the Punta della Salute gauge for the first time in July or August; MOSE kept the lagoon below 90 cm, so the city stayed dry. "Never in summer" held for the city only because of the barrier.

The old pattern matters less than it did. The MOSE system of mobile gates closes the three inlets of the lagoon (Lido, Malamocco and Chioggia) when a high tide is forecast. By the Ministry of Infrastructure's count it was raised 100 times between 2020 and 12 March 2025, and 44 of those lifts were for tides between 80 cm and 1.10 m, so it also acts below the 110 cm line. According to ISPRA's indicator, Venice recorded three events of 110 cm or more from 2020 through 2024: two in 2020 and one on 16 May 2024, which lasted about 15 minutes. In 2019, before the barrier worked, there were 28.

What we did not find is guidance from the museum. The Peggy Guggenheim Collection's visit pages, as we read them on 3 November 2026, do not publish a policy for high water. If a tide is forecast, check the city's tide center (Centro Previsioni e Segnalazioni Maree) and the museum's own channels on the morning. Do not count on either a flood or a dry street from the calendar alone.

Guggenheim Abu Dhabi is not open as we write, and the museum had published no hours, rules or opening exhibition on 3 November 2026. The climate is not in doubt. At Abu Dhabi International Airport the 1991-2020 average high is 76 °F in January and 88 °F in November, and from May to September it runs from 103 to 110 °F, with August lows of 86 °F. Rain is nearly absent: about 50 mm a year, almost all of it between November and April. Anything outdoors is easiest in the cool months, which is also when the museum is scheduled to open. Our page on what we know about Abu Dhabi will carry the facts once they exist.

A "normal" is a 30-year average, and the current standard is 1991-2020. Many Spanish weather pages still display 1981-2010; the public pages of the Spanish agency AEMET did when we checked, and they give slightly different values (for example, a January rainfall of 120 mm in Bilbao against the 131 mm of the newer period). We used the newer figures, taken from the World Meteorological Organization's 1991-2020 package as archived by NOAA, and from NOAA's own U.S. Climate Normals for New York. We list each station so you can check us.

Two cautions. Airports sit outside the city, so city-center temperatures can run a degree or two different, and a hill station like Igueldo reads cooler in summer than the seafront. And annual rain is a sum of monthly normals, rounded: New York about 1,258 mm (49.5 inches), Bilbao 1,155 mm, San Sebastián coast 1,684 mm, Venice about 762 mm.

Honest crowd data is scarce, so we use only what is published. The Spanish statistics institute (INE) publishes monthly hotel overnight stays for Bilbao and San Sebastián. In 2025, hotels in Bilbao recorded 274,573 overnight stays in August against 117,472 in January, a ratio of 2.34 to 1. In San Sebastián August had 245,769 against 115,910 in January, 2.12 to 1. August is the fullest month in both cities, which fits the Aste Nagusia and Semana Grande festivals. July is close behind: 242,893 stays in Bilbao (2.07 times January) and 239,124 in San Sebastián (2.06). In San Sebastián the gap is narrow (August 11.2% of the year against July 10.9% in 2025), and in 2023 July came out ahead. Bilbao's profile is stable: August's share of the year was 12.3% in 2023, 12.0% in 2024 and 11.7% in 2025, and January sat near 5% each year.

Read that number for what it is. It counts overnight stays by every hotel guest in the city, not visitors to the museum, and it says nothing about the queue at the door. It does tell you when beds are scarce.

For the other two cities, no monthly series is public. New York's tourism office reported about 64.3 million visitors for 2024 as a year-end forecast, and we found no public monthly series. Venice publishes annual figures (for 2023, 5.66 million arrivals in the municipality) and nothing by month that we could find. We therefore will not tell you that January is quiet in New York or that October is crowded in Venice. We have no source for either.

We list events by rule rather than by date, because dates move and the rule does not. For this year's dates, check each organizer. We also say what we could and could not confirm about the effect on a museum visit.

Daylight shapes a museum day more than people expect, especially for the walk back at the end. Using the standard sunrise and sunset definition, we calculated day length for each city at the June and December solstices. Our margin is about two minutes, and we did not cross-check against the U.S. Naval Observatory tables, which are the place to look for an exact day.

Venice swings by 7 hours between solstices, and New York by under 6. Average sunshine tells the same story: Bilbao gets 74 hours in December and 177 in July, and Venice 78 against 288. If you are building a winter day in Bilbao or Venice, put the museum in the dark afternoon and the walk in the morning.

Only the structure is worth knowing in advance; the exact days and hours change every year and belong on the pages that own them. Bilbao extends its closing time into the evening in summer and in Holy Week, and has opened on Mondays in summer, while keeping a regular weekly closing day the rest of the year. New York publishes special closing times for individual days and has listed Thanksgiving and Christmas Day as closures. Venice keeps one weekly closing day, Tuesday, plus Christmas Day. We checked these on 3 November 2026. Before you book, go to the city page for current times: New York, Bilbao or Venice. This site is independent and not affiliated with the museums or the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation; we link their pages as our sources.