VacationSelector

Alicante or Bruges?

Two destinations compared on nine measures of openly sourced data. Weight what matters to you and the verdict follows.

Your match

Alicante
✓ Best match
56
match

Wins on beaches & swimming and year-round weather with your weighting.

Bruges
44
match

Wins on good for families and museums & heritage with your weighting.

What matters to you?

Pick a travel style or drag the sliders. The match scores above update as you do.

Scoreboard

Each measure scored 0 to 100. Open a row for the figures behind the score.

AlicanteBruges
Beaches & swimming. Alicante leads by 69 points.69
AlicanteBruges
Score778
Swim season months50
Beaches 10 km331
Coast distance1 km14 km
Water distance1 km14 km
Places to eat. Alicante leads by 9 points.9
AlicanteBruges
Score6657
Restaurants within 2 km of centre867443
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km3132
Museums & heritage. Bruges leads by 15 points.15
AlicanteBruges
Score4257
Museums within 10 km1430
Museums within 2 km of centre1124
Share of museums within 2 km %7980
Unesco sites within 50 km23
Nightlife. Alicante leads by 17 points.17
AlicanteBruges
Score5134
Drinking venues within 4 km591292
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre488233
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %8380
Nightclubs within 4 km548
Nature & day trips. Alicante leads by 14 points.14
AlicanteBruges
Score4026
Protected land share 50 km %72
Landscape blanket share 50 km %00
Land share of disc %5965
Park area within 2 km60 hectares59 hectares
Good for families. Bruges leads by 18 points.18
AlicanteBruges
Score4260
Tourist attractions within 2 km1352
Park area within 2 km60 hectares59 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km11
Sights concentration. Bruges leads by 14 points.14
AlicanteBruges
Score2640
Notable places within 2 km1840
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Alicante leads by 11 points.11
AlicanteBruges
Score7160
Price level global60.876.2
Daily budget€122€180
Year-round weather. Alicante leads by 31 points.31
AlicanteBruges
Score8756
Monthly daytime high17 °C to 31.1 °C6.4 °C to 22 °C
Monthly rainfall3 mm to 52 mm35 mm to 79 mm
Dry months111
0255075100

When should you go?

The figures behind each month. Each row is shaded against that destination's own year, so the deepest cell is its best month for that measure and the palest its weakest. Shades are not comparable between the two rows.

J
F
M
A
M
J
J
A
S
O
N
D
Daytime high, °C
Alicante
17
18
20
22
24
28
30
31
29
25
21
18
Bruges
6
7
10
13
17
20
22
22
19
15
10
7
Sea temperature, °C
Alicante
15
14
15
16
18
22
25
26
25
22
19
16
Bruges
7
6
7
9
12
15
18
19
18
15
11
8
Rainfall, mm
Alicante
21
18
25
34
21
8
3
12
52
32
34
23
Bruges
59
52
44
35
51
64
74
79
72
76
78
74
Daylight, hours per day
Alicante
10
11
12
13
14
15
15
14
13
11
10
10
Bruges
8
10
12
14
16
17
16
15
13
11
9
8
Sunshine, hours per day
Alicante
6
6
8
8
10
10
11
10
8
7
6
6
Bruges
3
3
5
7
8
8
8
7
6
4
3
2

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. Alicante: 1991-2020 normals, Alicante (2.8 km from centre). Bruges: 1991-2020 normals, Vlissingen (37.4 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromAlicanteBruges
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
2 h 25 m
€46-56
ALC · 10 km
1 h 5 m
€98-165
1 stop
BRU · 94 km
MadridMAD
1 h 5 m
€72-86
ALC · 10 km
2 h 15 m
€98-170
BRU · 94 km
RomeFCO, CIA
2 h 0 m
€102-136
1 stop
ALC · 10 km
2 h 5 m
€87-136
1 stop
BRU · 94 km
DublinDUB
2 h 45 m
€98-122
1 stop
ALC · 10 km
1 h 35 m
no fares
BRU · 94 km
MilanMXP, BGY, LIN
2 h 0 m
€62-83
ALC · 10 km
1 h 25 m
€36-101
BRU · 94 km
IstanbulIST, SAW
3 h 35 m
€167-378
VLC · 127 km
3 h 10 m
€161-193
BRU · 94 km
ViennaVIE
2 h 45 m
no fares
ALC · 10 km
1 h 45 m
€93-156
BRU · 94 km
LisbonLIS
1 h 35 m
€56-140
VLC · 127 km
2 h 40 m
€120-263
BRU · 94 km
AlgiersALG
1 h 5 m
no fares
ALC · 10 km
2 h 30 m
no fares
LIL · 72 km
MontrealYUL, YHU, YMX
7 h 30 m
no fares
VLC · 127 km
7 h 10 m
€421
BRU · 94 km

The busiest departure cities for these two, with a place kept for each other part of the world. Busiest means arriving passengers where an official count exists, and where none does, the number of non-stop services flown: official route statistics are published by the European reporting countries and by nobody else, so a table ranked on them alone would offer a reader in New York or Tokyo ten European cities. Flying times are estimated from the distance between airports, and every row is a city flown non-stop to both. Where the typical offer connects anyway, the stops are shown. Under each figure is the airport the flight lands at and how far that is from the centre, because the nearest airport is not always the one a route is flown to. Where both columns name the same airport it is one flight, and the difference between the two is the distance printed beside it. Typical return fares for 2026-08 to 2026-10, cached market data up to 7 days old. The figure is the middle half of the offers found, so a single price means they agreed and a range means they did not; for a typical route that middle half spans about a quarter of the median, and for the least settled routes rather more than the median itself.

Before you go

MeasureAlicanteBruges
Official languageSpanishFrench, German, Dutch
CurrencyEuro (EUR)Euro (EUR)
SocketsCF230 V, 50 HzCE230 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideRightRight
Time zoneUTC+1, UTC+2 in summerUTC+1, UTC+2 in summer
Emergency number112112
Elevation3 m2 m
Main airportAlicante-Elche Miguel Hernández Airport (ALC)10 km from centre124 non-stop destinationsBrussels Airport (BRU)94 km from centre191 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year13 days14 days

By the numbers

MeasureAlicanteBruges
City population366,221118,509
People per km²1,819840
Museums within 10 km838
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km23
Distinct cuisines in the centre5251
Swim season, months above 21 °C5 monthsNone

Where else could you go?

Every comparison below shares a destination with this one, so you can follow Alicante or Bruges somewhere new.

Browse every destination we have measured

Sources

© OpenStreetMap contributors, data available under the Open Database Licence. Place counts include data from Overture Maps Foundation (CDLA Permissive 2.0), assembled from Meta, Microsoft, Foursquare and other providers. Notable-place counts from Wikidata (CC0), weighted by Wikipedia language editions. Structured data from Wikidata (CC0). Weather data by Meteostat. Meteorological data provided by NOAA, DWD and others. Sea surface temperature from NOAA OISST v2.1, NOAA Physical Sciences Laboratory. Airport data from OurAirports (public domain). Tourism statistics from Eurostat, © European Union, reused under CC BY 4.0. Public holidays from Nager.Date (MIT). Non-stop route lists from the "Airlines and destinations" tables on English Wikipedia airport articles, by Wikipedia contributors, reused under CC BY-SA 4.0. Currency from the ISO 4217 register maintained by SIX, cross-checked against country data from GeoNames (CC BY 4.0). Price level from World Bank open data (PPP conversion factor for private consumption and official exchange rate), CC BY 4.0. Time zones from GeoNames (CC BY 4.0); clock offsets computed from the IANA time zone database. Daylight hours computed from each destination's latitude using the NOAA solar position algorithm. Typical fares from Travelpayouts (Aviasales data). Route-level air passenger statistics from Eurostat, © European Union, reused under CC BY 4.0. Exchange rates via Frankfurter, based on European Central Bank reference rates.

Scores follow rubric v2; snapshot generated 2026-08-31. Typical prices can be up to 7 days old. Daily budgets are estimates from country price levels.