VacationSelector

Belfast or Portland?

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

Your match

Belfast
✓ Best match
48
match

Wins on beaches & swimming and nature & day trips with your weighting.

Portland
42
match

Wins on places to eat and year-round weather 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.

BelfastPortland
Beaches & swimming. Belfast leads by 48 points.48
BelfastPortland
Score480
Swim season months00
Beaches 10 km1027
Coast distance1 km69 km
Water distance1 km
Places to eat. Portland leads by 18 points.18
BelfastPortland
Score5674
Restaurants within 2 km of centre4321,011
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km3144
Museums & heritage. Portland leads by 6 points.6
BelfastPortland
Score2935
Museums within 10 km1823
Museums within 2 km of centre615
Share of museums within 2 km %3365
Unesco sites within 50 km10
Nightlife. Portland leads by 10 points.10
BelfastPortland
Score4858
Drinking venues within 4 km550942
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre348518
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %6355
Nightclubs within 4 km2932
Nature & day trips. Belfast leads by 18 points.18
BelfastPortland
Score5335
Protected land share 50 km %1913
Landscape blanket share 50 km %133
Land share of disc %65100
Park area within 2 km68 hectares37 hectares
Good for families. Belfast leads by 14 points.14
BelfastPortland
Score4834
Tourist attractions within 2 km168
Park area within 2 km68 hectares37 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km22
Sights concentration. Belfast leads by 7 points.7
BelfastPortland
Score4235
Notable places within 2 km4329
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Belfast leads by 11 points.11
BelfastPortland
Score5443
Price level global84.9100
Daily budget
Year-round weather. Portland leads by 14 points.14
BelfastPortland
Score5165
Monthly daytime high6.9 °C to 19 °C7.9 °C to 27.7 °C
Monthly rainfall55 mm to 89 mm13 mm to 145 mm
Dry months03
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
Belfast
7
8
10
12
15
18
19
19
17
13
10
7
Portland
8
11
13
16
20
23
27
28
25
18
12
8
Sea temperature, °C
Belfast
9
8
8
8
9
11
12
13
14
14
12
11
Portland
No coastline within reach
Rainfall, mm
Belfast
74
62
60
56
55
65
74
86
67
89
87
85
Portland
128
94
101
75
65
41
13
14
39
87
138
145
Daylight, hours per day
Belfast
8
10
12
14
16
17
17
15
13
11
9
7
Portland
9
10
12
14
15
16
15
14
13
11
10
9
Sunshine, hours per day
Belfast
2
2
3
5
6
5
5
5
4
3
2
2
Portland
No sunshine record

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). Portland: 1991-2020 normals, Portland International Airport (9.8 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromBelfastPortland
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
6 h 40 m
no fares
DUB · 132 km
5 h 20 m
no fares
PDX · 10 km
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
1 h 15 m
€72-142
BHD · 4 km
9 h 55 m
no fares
PDX · 10 km
Los AngelesLAX, BUR, SNA, VNY
10 h 25 m
no fares
DUB · 132 km
2 h 15 m
no fares
PDX · 10 km
ChicagoORD, MDW, DPA, PWK +1
7 h 35 m
no fares
DUB · 132 km
3 h 55 m
no fares
PDX · 10 km
SeattleSEA, BFI
9 h 15 m
no fares
DUB · 132 km
55 m
no fares
PDX · 10 km
San FranciscoSFO
10 h 20 m
no fares
DUB · 132 km
1 h 45 m
no fares
PDX · 10 km
DallasDFW, DAL, AFW
9 h 5 m
no fares
DUB · 132 km
3 h 45 m
no fares
PDX · 10 km
AmsterdamAMS
1 h 35 m
no fares
BHD · 4 km
10 h 5 m
no fares
PDX · 10 km
AtlantaATL, PDK
8 h 5 m
no fares
DUB · 132 km
4 h 45 m
no fares
PDX · 10 km
CancunCUN
9 h 30 m
no fares
DUB · 132 km
5 h 40 m
no fares
PDX · 10 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

MeasureBelfastPortland
Official languageEnglish
CurrencyPound Sterling (GBP)US Dollar (USD)
SocketsG230 V, 50 HzAB120 V, 60 Hz
Driving sideLeftRight
Time zoneUTC, UTC+1 in summerUTC-8, UTC-7 in summer
Emergency number112 or 999911
Elevation3 m152 m
Main airportGeorge Best Belfast City Airport (BHD)4 km from centre24 non-stop destinationsPortland International Airport (PDX)10 km from centre87 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year10 days12 days

By the numbers

MeasureBelfastPortland
City population345,006652,503
People per km²3,0001,736
Museums within 10 km817
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km10
Distinct cuisines in the centre4482
Swim season, months above 21 °CNone

Where else could you go?

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