The top 10 rainiest cities in the world - have you visited one?

As we face downpour after downpour, as November and December are the rainiest months in the UK, it's difficult to imagine that it could get much wetter than this.

We know that Glasgow, Cardiff and Manchester are the UK’s wettest cities – but without meaning to rain on their parade, the precipitation there is just a drop in the ocean.

BBC Bitesize scours the globe – and looks into the wettest cities across the world to find out who’s top of the drops.

Where are the rainiest cities in the world?

So where in the world should you definitely pack an umbrella if you’re visiting? Here’s our top 10 wettest cities list by average annual rainfall.

1. Quibdó, Colombia 7328mm
2. Buenaventura, Colombia 6,276mm
3. Mawlamyine, Myanmar 4772mm
4. Monrovia, Liberia 4540mm
5. Freetown, Sierra Leone 4433mm
6. Conakry, Guinea 3784mm
7. Douala, Cameroon 3603mm
8. Palikir, Micronesia 3459mm
9. Hilo, USA 3219mm
10. Cocobeach, Gabon 3126mm

How can we tell which city is the wettest?

We’ve crunched the numbers to try to work out which cities around the world have the most rainfall – using the average, annual rainfall as the ranking factor.

We took data from the World Meteorological Organization (a United Nations weather, climate and water agency), the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (a United States government agency that, among other things, provides precipitation statistics) and numbers from other national meteorological agencies, to compile our list.

But what does average, annual rainfall actually mean?

The figure is based upon the total depth of water that would gather somewhere in the unlikely event that all the rain stayed on the ground without draining away or evaporating.

So, using the figures we know for Glasgow’s average rainfall of 1370mm – that would be the equivalent of filling a swimming pool to 1.37m, which is roughly the average height of a 10 year old child. Definitely a lot of rain, but we’re nowhere near the deep end here.

Quibdó is the wettest city in the world, making Glasgow’s annual rainfall look like a spot of mild drizzle. The rainfall in the Colombian city of Quibdó is, on average, around 7.3m of water each year. This is the rough equivalent of filling three classic red phone boxes with rain – and that’s across the whole city!

Why are these places so wet?

If we look at all of the cities in our top 10 list, there are some clear linking factors between them.

All of the cities are on the coast – with the exception of our leader Quibdó, which is on the Pacific coastal plain – a flat piece of land next to the ocean, often surrounded by mountains.

Those mountains – in Quibdó’s case, the Andes, to the city’s east – play their part in the rainfall, by trapping wind and moisture to contribute to the wet weather. The city’s location near the equator leads to moist, warm air rising and precipitation. The conditions there create a near perfect storm for rainfall.

One of the other linking factors is that almost all of the top 10 are cities on their country’s west coast. Weather systems generally move from west to east, with the air drying out and rainfall reducing by the time it reaches the east coast.

That means that these cities, predominantly on the west coasts of South America or Africa, are taking the brunt of the weather systems before others – meaning they’re often hit the hardest.

So is Quibdó the wettest place on earth?

Not even close.

While our list was sticking to cities and urban areas, some villages, small towns and mountain ranges experience even more rainfall on an annual basis.

The small, picturesque village of Mawsynram in the north-east of India blows Quibdó out of the water, with an astonishing average annual rainfall of around 11,871mm.

Using our now, universally accepted Bitesize method of filling phone boxes with rain, that’s almost five red phone boxes worth of water each year.

Mawsynram is high up in the Khasi Hills in India and is regularly hit by warm air from the Bay of Bengal. The village is also affected by monsoons, with the season running from April to October each year.

A neighbouring village – Cherrapunji, just across the valley from Mawsynram – receives slightly less annual average rainfall but does have the honour of holding the world record for the most rainfall ever in one year.

They were awarded the world record based on World Meteorological Organization data going all the way back to the 19th Century. Between 1 August 1860 and 31 July 1861, they experienced 26,470mm of rain.

That’s around 10.5 phone boxes worth of water across the whole village in the space of a year.

Finally – you may often hear on weather reports lines that a certain place is receiving a month’s worth of rain in a day, particularly during a storm.

Well, how about more than a year’s worth of Glasgow rain in a day?

In 1966, Foc Foc on the French island terrirory of Réunion in the Indian Ocean had a record breaking 1,825mm of rain in a 24 hour period in January during the passage of a tropical cyclone. That’s around half a metre more than Glasgow gets in a year, in a single day.

So while we, and Travis, will often ask ‘Why does it always rain on me?’ – perhaps the Scottish’s band’s anthem would be better suited to the people of Quibcó, Mawsynram and Foc Foc.

This article was published in November 2025