Why are Conda Virtual Environments so big?

Question

Out of curiosity I just compared the size of a virtual environment directory created by Conda with one that was created by virtualenv.

$ conda create -p venv_conda python=3.6

$ python -m virtualenv venv_virtualenv

The size of the conda environment on Windows 7 is 110MB while the virtualenv environment only takes 22MB. That's five times as much. Does someone know why there is so much space needed by the conda environment?

Answer 1

I read an answer in here https://www.reddit.com/r/learnpython/comments/2yurjj/conda_environment_vs_virtualenv/

which states:

A good advantage of conda environment is that it not only installs python libraries, but also dependencies (like Qt when installing PyQt). It makes installation so much easier that you should use conda when possible.

If that still applies, that will be the reason for that massive difference between the virtualenv environment and the conda one.