VacationSelector

Belfast or Cardiff?

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

Your match

Too close to call, level with your weighting

Belfast
48
match

Wins on good for families and nature & day trips with your weighting.

Cardiff
48
match

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

What matters to you?

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

The verdict

Choose Belfast if you are travelling with children: it has many times as many tourist attractions near the centre as Cardiff, plus 10 beaches nearby and the sea 1km from the centre.

Choose Cardiff if museums shape the trip, with about three times as many as Belfast, and if you want warmer, sunnier days and a sea worth swimming in during late summer.

Scoreboard

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

BelfastCardiff
Beaches & swimming. Belfast leads by 2 points.2
BelfastCardiff
Score4846
Swim season months00
Beaches 10 km108
Coast distance1 km2 km
Water distance1 km2 km
Places to eat. Cardiff leads by 4 points.4
BelfastCardiff
Score5660
Restaurants within 2 km of centre432541
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km3132
Museums & heritage. Cardiff leads by 10 points.10
BelfastCardiff
Score2939
Museums within 10 km1861
Museums within 2 km of centre66
Share of museums within 2 km %3310
Unesco sites within 50 km11
Nightlife. Belfast and Cardiff are level on 48.
BelfastCardiff
Score4848
Drinking venues within 4 km550536
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre348395
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %6374
Nightclubs within 4 km2935
Nature & day trips. Belfast leads by 3 points.3
BelfastCardiff
Score5350
Protected land share 50 km %1918
Landscape blanket share 50 km %1315
Land share of disc %6568
Park area within 2 km68 hectares88 hectares
Good for families. Belfast leads by 16 points.16
BelfastCardiff
Score4832
Tourist attractions within 2 km164
Park area within 2 km68 hectares88 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km22
Sights concentration. Cardiff leads by 3 points.3
BelfastCardiff
Score4245
Notable places within 2 km4351
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Belfast and Cardiff are level on 54.
BelfastCardiff
Score5454
Price level global84.984.9
Daily budget——
Year-round weather. Cardiff leads by 3 points.3
BelfastCardiff
Score5154
Monthly daytime high6.9 °C to 19 °C7.7 °C to 20.2 °C
Monthly rainfall55 mm to 89 mm49 mm to 87 mm
Dry months00
0255075100

Where they differ

Belfast is the better city for families: it has many times as many tourist attractions near the centre, and both cities have 2 theme parks within reach, so the difference is in what sits on your doorstep rather than in the wider region.

Cardiff has about three times as many museums, though both have 1 UNESCO-listed place within day-trip reach, so the gap is in what you can do in town rather than out of it. It also has somewhat more restaurants near the centre, with a similar range of kitchens in both.

Where they are alike

Nightlife is the clearest thing they share: much the same number of places to drink, most of them near the centre in both cities, with Cardiff holding somewhat more nightclubs.

They are close on coast, countryside and walking. Neither has a month of sea at 21°C or more, the sea sits 1km from Belfast's centre and 2km from Cardiff's, protected land runs at 19% and 18% respectively, and both put many notable places within walking distance of the centre.

Which traveller are you?

Families with young children are better served in Belfast, which has many times as many tourist attractions near the centre. Both cities have 2 theme parks within reach, so the day trips even out.

Anyone building a trip around museums should pick Cardiff, with roughly three times as many as Belfast and somewhat more notable places within walking distance of the centre, so more of the day is spent on foot.

Swimmers face a trade-off. Belfast has more beaches nearby and the sea 1km from the centre, but Cardiff's water reaches 18°C in late summer against Belfast's 14°C.

What the numbers don't tell you

The two cities share a value figure because it is a national price level, identical for both by construction. This dataset carries no daily budget for either city, so no cost comparison is possible here: nothing in it makes one cheaper than the other, and you would need to price accommodation and eating out yourself.

Belfast's beach advantage is about access rather than swimming: 10 beaches and the sea 1km from the centre, but the water tops out at 14°C and neither city gets a genuinely warm sea month. Neither has a month at 40mm of rain or less either, so wet days are possible whenever you go.

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
Belfast
7
8
10
12
15
18
19
19
17
13
10
7
Cardiff
8
8
10
13
16
18
20
20
18
14
11
9
Sea temperature, °C
Belfast
9
8
8
8
9
11
12
13
14
14
12
11
Cardiff
8
7
8
9
12
15
17
18
17
15
12
9
Rainfall, mm
Belfast
74
62
60
56
55
65
74
86
67
89
87
85
Cardiff
77
55
49
54
56
56
61
66
54
87
83
79
Daylight, hours per day
Belfast
8
10
12
14
16
17
17
15
13
11
9
7
Cardiff
8
10
12
14
16
17
16
15
13
11
9
8
Sunshine, hours per day
Belfast
2
2
3
5
6
5
5
5
4
3
2
2
Cardiff
2
3
4
6
7
7
7
6
5
4
2
2

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. Belfast: 1991-2020 normals, Belfast / Aldergrove Airport (19.4 km from centre). Cardiff: 1991-2020 normals, Cardiff-Wales Airport (14.9 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Belfast is at its best in early summer, when highs reach 18-19°C and rainfall sits near its yearly low, around 55-65mm. Its sea never passes 14°C, so the coast is for walking rather than swimming, whatever the weather does.

Cardiff holds its warmth longer: highs of 20°C in July and August with the sea at 17-18°C, and still 18°C in September on 54mm of rain. Both cities turn wet from October, near 87-89mm, and stay so through winter.

Getting there

Flying fromBelfastCardiff
PalmaPMI
2 h 50 m
no fares
BFS · 20 km
2 h 20 m
no fares
BRS · 34 km
ArrecifeACE
4 h 5 m
no fares
BFS · 20 km
3 h 45 m
no fares
BRS · 34 km
Puerto del RosarioFUE
4 h 10 m
no fares
BFS · 20 km
3 h 50 m
no fares
BRS · 34 km
AntalyaAYT
4 h 40 m
no fares
BFS · 20 km
4 h 20 m
no fares
BRS · 34 km
Las PalmasLPA
4 h 15 m
no fares
BFS · 20 km
4 h 0 m
no fares
BRS · 34 km
IbizaIBZ
2 h 50 m
no fares
BFS · 20 km
2 h 20 m
no fares
BRS · 34 km
MalagaAGP
3 h 0 m
€135-197
BFS · 20 km
2 h 35 m
no fares
CWL · 15 km
MarrakechRAK
3 h 40 m
no fares
BFS · 20 km
3 h 20 m
no fares
BRS · 34 km
CancunCUN
9 h 30 m
no fares
DUB · 132 km
9 h 55 m
no fares
BHX · 146 km
TorontoYYZ, YHM, YTZ
6 h 50 m
€449-527
1 stop
DUB · 132 km
7 h 10 m
no fares
CWL · 15 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 2026-09 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

MeasureBelfastCardiff
Official languageEnglishEnglish
CurrencyPound Sterling (GBP)Pound Sterling (GBP)
SocketsG230 V, 50 HzG230 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideLeftLeft
Time zoneUTC, UTC+1 in summerUTC, UTC+1 in summer
Emergency number112 or 999112 or 999
Elevation3 m41 m
Main airportGeorge Best Belfast City Airport (BHD)4 km from centre24 non-stop destinationsCardiff International Airport (CWL)15 km from centre8 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year10 days8 days

By the numbers

MeasureBelfastCardiff
City population345,006383,536
People per km²3,0002,734
Museums within 10 km89
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km11
Distinct cuisines in the centre4455
Swim season, months above 21 °CNoneNone

Where else could you go?

Every comparison below shares a destination with this one, so you can follow Belfast or Cardiff 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). Public holidays from Nager.Date (MIT). Exchange rates via Frankfurter, based on European Central Bank reference rates. 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.

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.