VacationSelector

Antwerp or York?

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

Your match

Antwerp
✓ Best match
51
match

Wins on museums & heritage and places to eat with your weighting.

York
41
match

Has no clear advantage with the weighting you have chosen.

What matters to you?

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

The verdict

Choose Antwerp if the city itself is the point: more museums, more restaurants and more places to drink, all packed close enough to walk between, and slightly warmer summers at 23°C.

Choose York if you want a smaller, quieter base with more protected countryside around it, 17% of the surrounding land, and drier months for walking.

Scoreboard

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

AntwerpYork
Beaches & swimming. Antwerp and York are level on 0.
AntwerpYork
Score00
Swim season months00
Beaches 10 km12
Coast distance21 km50 km
Water distance——
Places to eat. Antwerp leads by 21 points.21
AntwerpYork
Score7554
Restaurants within 2 km of centre1,164361
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km4231
Museums & heritage. Antwerp leads by 23 points.23
AntwerpYork
Score6946
Museums within 10 km4118
Museums within 2 km of centre2716
Share of museums within 2 km %6689
Unesco sites within 50 km92
Nightlife. Antwerp leads by 16 points.16
AntwerpYork
Score5943
Drinking venues within 4 km866450
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre657353
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %7678
Nightclubs within 4 km7314
Nature & day trips. Antwerp leads by 1 points.1
AntwerpYork
Score3433
Protected land share 50 km %717
Landscape blanket share 50 km %016
Land share of disc %8095
Park area within 2 km53 hectares42 hectares
Good for families. Antwerp leads by 3 points.3
AntwerpYork
Score4643
Tourist attractions within 2 km1413
Park area within 2 km53 hectares42 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km33
Sights concentration. Antwerp leads by 15 points.15
AntwerpYork
Score5439
Notable places within 2 km8837
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Antwerp leads by 6 points.6
AntwerpYork
Score6054
Price level global76.284.9
Daily budget€180—
Year-round weather. Antwerp leads by 2 points.2
AntwerpYork
Score5856
Monthly daytime high6.5 °C to 23.2 °C6.7 °C to 20.9 °C
Monthly rainfall47 mm to 90 mm39 mm to 66 mm
Dry months01
0255075100

Where they differ

Antwerp is the stronger city for museum days and late nights: 9 UNESCO-listed places within day-trip reach against York's 2, a wider range of kitchens, and many times as many nightclubs, most of them close to the centre. Twice as many notable places sit within walking distance there, so a day covers more ground on foot.

York is the smaller, calmer base, with a larger share of protected countryside around it and less rain through much of the year: March falls to 39mm, while no Antwerp month drops below 47mm.

Where they are alike

Neither is a place to swim. York has 2 beaches nearby to Antwerp's 1, and neither has a month with sea at 21°C or more, so either trip is a city trip.

Beyond that, both offer day trips into surrounding countryside rather than being outdoor destinations themselves, and both run mild rather than hot, with July highs near 21-23°C. For families, each has 3 theme parks within reach and a similar count of attractions near the centre.

Which traveller are you?

Museum-led travellers, and anyone who eats and drinks their way through a weekend, should take Antwerp: twice as many notable places within walking distance of the centre, a wider spread of kitchens, and clubs that run late.

Walkers wanting a quiet base will do better in York, where far more of the surrounding land is protected and spring is dry enough to plan around. The city itself is small and covered quickly.

Families face a close call: both have 3 theme parks within reach and a similar number of attractions near the centre. Antwerp adds more park space near the centre and warmer summers; York is the quieter, more compact option.

What the numbers don't tell you

There is no cost comparison to be made here. The data gives a daily budget for Antwerp, around €180, but carries no equivalent figure for York at all, so neither city can be called the cheaper trip. The value ranking rests on a different measure, not on what a day costs.

Beach counts mislead in both directions. Each city registers a beach or two nearby, yet neither has a month of sea at 21°C or more. And Antwerp's warmest months are also its wettest, with August at 90mm, so a summer trip there buys heat and rain together.

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
Antwerp
7
8
11
15
19
21
23
23
20
15
10
7
York
7
8
10
13
16
19
21
20
18
14
10
7
Rainfall, mm
Antwerp
77
67
59
47
61
72
80
90
67
71
75
89
York
53
44
39
48
43
61
56
65
58
66
62
60
Daylight, hours per day
Antwerp
8
10
12
14
16
17
16
15
13
11
9
8
York
8
10
12
14
16
17
17
15
13
11
9
8
Sunshine, hours per day
Antwerp
2
2
4
6
6
7
7
6
5
4
2
1
York
2
3
4
5
6
5
6
5
4
3
2
2

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. Antwerp: 1991-2020 normals, Antwerpen / Deurne (5.2 km from centre). York: 1991-2020 normals, Leeming (47.9 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Antwerp is the better pick from May to September, warmer than York in every one of those months. May reaches 19°C on 61mm of rain, and April is its driest month at 47mm; by July and August the warmth arrives with the heaviest rain of the year, so an early-summer visit works better than a peak one.

York's case is spring: March to May stay at 39-48mm of rain with highs of 10-16°C, drier than anything Antwerp offers. Its summer peaks milder than Antwerp's.

Getting there

Flying fromAntwerpYork
BarcelonaBCN
1 h 55 m
€47-116
BRU · 36 km
2 h 20 m
no fares
LBA · 39 km
GenevaGVA
1 h 20 m
no fares
BRU · 36 km
1 h 50 m
no fares
LBA · 39 km
MadridMAD
2 h 15 m
€98-170
BRU · 36 km
2 h 20 m
no fares
MAN · 104 km
RomeFCO, CIA
2 h 5 m
€87-136
1 stop
BRU · 36 km
2 h 40 m
no fares
LBA · 39 km
BucharestOTP, BBU
2 h 45 m
€72-114
CRL · 85 km
3 h 20 m
no fares
LBA · 39 km
MalagaAGP
2 h 45 m
no fares
ANR · 6 km
2 h 55 m
no fares
LBA · 39 km
BridgetownBGI
9 h 5 m
no fares
AMS · 123 km
8 h 35 m
no fares
MAN · 104 km
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
7 h 35 m
no fares
BRU · 36 km
7 h 0 m
no fares
MAN · 104 km
AgadirAGA
3 h 40 m
no fares
CRL · 85 km
3 h 50 m
no fares
LBA · 39 km
BeijingPEK, PKX
10 h 0 m
no fares
BRU · 36 km
10 h 10 m
no fares
MAN · 104 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

MeasureAntwerpYork
Official languageFrench, German, DutchEnglish
CurrencyEuro (EUR)Pound Sterling (GBP)
SocketsCE230 V, 50 HzG230 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideRightLeft
Time zoneUTC+1, UTC+2 in summerUTC, UTC+1 in summer
Emergency number112112 or 999
Elevation7 m25 m
Main airportBrussels Airport (BRU)36 km from centre191 non-stop destinationsLeeds Bradford Airport (LBA)39 km from centre73 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year14 days8 days

By the numbers

MeasureAntwerpYork
City population529,247208,400
People per km²2,542766
Museums within 10 km3824
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km92
Distinct cuisines in the centre8054

Where else could you go?

Every comparison below shares a destination with this one, so you can follow Antwerp or York 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. 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. Exchange rates via Frankfurter, based on European Central Bank reference rates. 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.

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.