VacationSelector

Barcelona or Ghent?

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 beaches & swimming and nightlife with your weighting.

Ghent
50
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.

Scoreboard

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

BarcelonaGhent
Beaches & swimming. Barcelona leads by 39 points.39
BarcelonaGhent
Score6526
Swim season months30
Beaches 10 km208
Coast distance2 km32 km
Water distance2 km32 km
Places to eat. Barcelona leads by 20 points.20
BarcelonaGhent
Score9070
Restaurants within 2 km of centre3,786764
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km4149
Museums & heritage. Barcelona leads by 10 points.10
BarcelonaGhent
Score6858
Museums within 10 km10524
Museums within 2 km of centre4920
Share of museums within 2 km %4783
Unesco sites within 50 km35
Nightlife. Barcelona leads by 33 points.33
BarcelonaGhent
Score8249
Drinking venues within 4 km2,711570
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre1,641446
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %6178
Nightclubs within 4 km24526
Nature & day trips. Barcelona leads by 16 points.16
BarcelonaGhent
Score5034
Protected land share 50 km %107
Landscape blanket share 50 km %04
Land share of disc %5187
Park area within 2 km49 hectares84 hectares
Good for families. Barcelona leads by 15 points.15
BarcelonaGhent
Score6550
Tourist attractions within 2 km6019
Park area within 2 km49 hectares84 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km31
Sights concentration. Barcelona leads by 27 points.27
BarcelonaGhent
Score7346
Notable places within 2 km25855
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Barcelona leads by 11 points.11
BarcelonaGhent
Score7160
Price level global60.876.2
Daily budget€122€180
Year-round weather. Barcelona leads by 22 points.22
BarcelonaGhent
Score7856
Monthly daytime high13.9 °C to 28.9 °C6.4 °C to 22 °C
Monthly rainfall27 mm to 83 mm35 mm to 79 mm
Dry months51
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
Ghent
6
7
10
13
17
20
22
22
19
15
10
7
Sea temperature, °C
Barcelona
14
13
13
14
17
21
24
25
24
21
17
15
Ghent
6
6
6
9
12
16
18
19
18
15
11
8
Rainfall, mm
Barcelona
41
32
40
47
44
27
27
51
83
82
45
36
Ghent
59
52
44
35
51
64
74
79
72
76
78
74
Daylight, hours per day
Barcelona
10
11
12
13
15
15
15
14
13
11
10
9
Ghent
9
10
12
14
16
17
16
15
13
11
9
8
Sunshine, hours per day
Barcelona
5
5
7
8
8
9
10
9
7
6
4
4
Ghent
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. Barcelona: 1991-2020 normals, Barcelona / Aeropuerto (14.4 km from centre). Ghent: 1991-2020 normals, Vlissingen (44.9 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromBarcelonaGhent
MadridMAD
1 h 15 m
€114-118
BCN · 13 km
2 h 15 m
€98-170
BRU · 56 km
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
2 h 0 m
€37-96
BCN · 13 km
1 h 5 m
€98-165
1 stop
BRU · 56 km
RomeFCO, CIA
1 h 40 m
€54-89
BCN · 13 km
2 h 5 m
€87-136
1 stop
BRU · 56 km
MilanMXP, BGY, LIN
1 h 30 m
€33-92
BCN · 13 km
1 h 25 m
€36-101
BRU · 56 km
LisbonLIS
1 h 50 m
€46-94
BCN · 13 km
2 h 40 m
€120-263
BRU · 56 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
1 h 40 m
€79-101
BCN · 13 km
1 h 0 m
no fares
BRU · 56 km
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
7 h 55 m
€562-701
BCN · 13 km
7 h 35 m
no fares
BRU · 56 km
DubaiDXB, DWC
6 h 45 m
€369-388
BCN · 13 km
6 h 45 m
no fares
BRU · 56 km
BeijingPEK, PKX
11 h 0 m
no fares
BCN · 13 km
10 h 0 m
no fares
BRU · 56 km
Sao PauloGRU, VCP, CGH, RTE
11 h 0 m
no fares
BCN · 13 km
12 h 0 m
no fares
BRU · 56 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

MeasureBarcelonaGhent
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
Elevation9 m12 m
Main airportJosep Tarradellas Barcelona-El Prat Airport (BCN)13 km from centre229 non-stop destinationsBrussels Airport (BRU)56 km from centre191 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year14 days14 days

By the numbers

MeasureBarcelonaGhent
City population1,731,649272,657
People per km²17,0941,728
Museums within 10 km9530
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km35
Distinct cuisines in the centre12883
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 Ghent 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. Ground elevations sampled from the Mapzen terrain tiles via OpenTopoData, merging SRTM, ASTER, NED, EU-DEM and national sources. 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.