VacationSelector

Barcelona or Belfast?

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

Your match

Barcelona
✓ Best match
71
match

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

Belfast
48
match

Wins on nature & day trips 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.

BarcelonaBelfast
Beaches & swimming. Barcelona leads by 17 points.17
BarcelonaBelfast
Score6548
Swim season months30
Beaches 10 km2010
Coast distance2 km1 km
Water distance2 km1 km
Places to eat. Barcelona leads by 34 points.34
BarcelonaBelfast
Score9056
Restaurants within 2 km of centre3,786432
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km4131
Museums & heritage. Barcelona leads by 39 points.39
BarcelonaBelfast
Score6829
Museums within 10 km10518
Museums within 2 km of centre496
Share of museums within 2 km %4733
Unesco sites within 50 km31
Nightlife. Barcelona leads by 34 points.34
BarcelonaBelfast
Score8248
Drinking venues within 4 km2,711550
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre1,641348
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %6163
Nightclubs within 4 km24529
Nature & day trips. Belfast leads by 3 points.3
BarcelonaBelfast
Score5053
Protected land share 50 km %1019
Landscape blanket share 50 km %013
Land share of disc %5165
Park area within 2 km49 hectares68 hectares
Good for families. Barcelona leads by 17 points.17
BarcelonaBelfast
Score6548
Tourist attractions within 2 km6016
Park area within 2 km49 hectares68 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km32
Sights concentration. Barcelona leads by 31 points.31
BarcelonaBelfast
Score7342
Notable places within 2 km25843
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Barcelona leads by 17 points.17
BarcelonaBelfast
Score7154
Price level global60.884.9
Daily budget€122
Year-round weather. Barcelona leads by 27 points.27
BarcelonaBelfast
Score7851
Monthly daytime high13.9 °C to 28.9 °C6.9 °C to 19 °C
Monthly rainfall27 mm to 83 mm55 mm to 89 mm
Dry months50
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
Barcelona
14
14
16
19
22
26
28
29
26
22
18
15
Belfast
7
8
10
12
15
18
19
19
17
13
10
7
Sea temperature, °C
Barcelona
14
13
13
14
17
21
24
25
24
21
17
15
Belfast
9
8
8
8
9
11
12
13
14
14
12
11
Rainfall, mm
Barcelona
41
32
40
47
44
27
27
51
83
82
45
36
Belfast
74
62
60
56
55
65
74
86
67
89
87
85
Daylight, hours per day
Barcelona
10
11
12
13
15
15
15
14
13
11
10
9
Belfast
8
10
12
14
16
17
17
15
13
11
9
7
Sunshine, hours per day
Barcelona
5
5
7
8
8
9
10
9
7
6
4
4
Belfast
2
2
3
5
6
5
5
5
4
3
2
2

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. Barcelona: 1991-2020 normals, Barcelona / Aeropuerto (14.4 km from centre). Belfast: 1991-2020 normals, Belfast / Aldergrove Airport (19.4 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromBarcelonaBelfast
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
2 h 0 m
€37-96
BCN · 13 km
1 h 15 m
€72-142
BHD · 4 km
PalmaPMI
55 m
€40-57
BCN · 13 km
2 h 50 m
no fares
BFS · 20 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
1 h 40 m
€79-101
BCN · 13 km
1 h 40 m
no fares
BFS · 20 km
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
7 h 55 m
€562-701
BCN · 13 km
6 h 40 m
no fares
DUB · 132 km
AmsterdamAMS
2 h 10 m
€132-158
BCN · 13 km
1 h 35 m
no fares
BHD · 4 km
MalagaAGP
1 h 35 m
€74-142
BCN · 13 km
3 h 0 m
€135-197
BFS · 20 km
ManchesterMAN
2 h 15 m
€71-76
BCN · 13 km
1 h 0 m
no fares
BHD · 4 km
DohaDOH
6 h 25 m
€282-445
2 stops
BCN · 13 km
7 h 20 m
no fares
DUB · 132 km
BeijingPEK, PKX
11 h 0 m
no fares
BCN · 13 km
10 h 25 m
no fares
DUB · 132 km
CancunCUN
10 h 35 m
no fares
BCN · 13 km
9 h 30 m
no fares
DUB · 132 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

MeasureBarcelonaBelfast
Official languageSpanishEnglish
CurrencyEuro (EUR)Pound Sterling (GBP)
SocketsCF230 V, 50 HzG230 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideRightLeft
Time zoneUTC+1, UTC+2 in summerUTC, UTC+1 in summer
Emergency number112112 or 999
Elevation9 m3 m
Main airportJosep Tarradellas Barcelona-El Prat Airport (BCN)13 km from centre229 non-stop destinationsGeorge Best Belfast City Airport (BHD)4 km from centre24 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year14 days10 days

By the numbers

MeasureBarcelonaBelfast
City population1,731,649345,006
People per km²17,0943,000
Museums within 10 km958
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km31
Distinct cuisines in the centre12844
Swim season, months above 21 °C3 monthsNone

Where else could you go?

Every comparison below shares a destination with this one, so you can follow Barcelona or Belfast 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. 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.