VacationSelector

Bilbao or Ghent?

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

Your match

Bilbao
✓ Best match
54
match

Wins on nature & day trips and year-round weather with your weighting.

Ghent
50
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.

Scoreboard

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

BilbaoGhent
Beaches & swimming. Bilbao leads by 5 points.5
BilbaoGhent
Score3126
Swim season months10
Beaches 10 km18
Coast distance0 km32 km
Water distance0 km32 km
Places to eat. Ghent leads by 8 points.8
BilbaoGhent
Score6270
Restaurants within 2 km of centre840764
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km2649
Museums & heritage. Ghent leads by 20 points.20
BilbaoGhent
Score3858
Museums within 10 km2524
Museums within 2 km of centre1220
Share of museums within 2 km %4883
Unesco sites within 50 km15
Nightlife. Bilbao leads by 9 points.9
BilbaoGhent
Score5849
Drinking venues within 4 km869570
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre730446
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %8478
Nightclubs within 4 km5026
Nature & day trips. Bilbao leads by 19 points.19
BilbaoGhent
Score5334
Protected land share 50 km %117
Landscape blanket share 50 km %04
Land share of disc %7087
Park area within 2 km119 hectares84 hectares
Good for families. Ghent leads by 3 points.3
BilbaoGhent
Score4750
Tourist attractions within 2 km1719
Park area within 2 km119 hectares84 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km01
Sights concentration. Bilbao leads by 6 points.6
BilbaoGhent
Score5246
Notable places within 2 km7955
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Bilbao leads by 11 points.11
BilbaoGhent
Score7160
Price level global60.876.2
Daily budget€122€180
Year-round weather. Bilbao leads by 14 points.14
BilbaoGhent
Score7056
Monthly daytime high13.5 °C to 26.3 °C6.4 °C to 22 °C
Monthly rainfall53 mm to 170 mm35 mm to 79 mm
Dry months01
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
Bilbao
14
14
17
18
21
24
25
26
25
21
17
14
Ghent
6
7
10
13
17
20
22
22
19
15
10
7
Sea temperature, °C
Bilbao
13
13
13
13
15
18
21
22
20
18
16
14
Ghent
6
6
6
9
12
16
18
19
18
15
11
8
Rainfall, mm
Bilbao
131
108
98
96
76
58
54
53
75
112
170
124
Ghent
59
52
44
35
51
64
74
79
72
76
78
74
Daylight, hours per day
Bilbao
9
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
Bilbao
3
3
5
5
6
6
6
6
5
4
3
3
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. Bilbao: 1991-2020 normals, Bilbao / Sondica (4.1 km from centre). Ghent: 1991-2020 normals, Vlissingen (44.9 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromBilbaoGhent
MadridMAD
1 h 0 m
no fares
BIO · 5 km
2 h 15 m
€98-170
BRU · 56 km
BarcelonaBCN
1 h 15 m
€58-78
BIO · 5 km
1 h 55 m
€47-116
BRU · 56 km
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
1 h 45 m
€62-91
BIO · 5 km
1 h 5 m
€98-165
1 stop
BRU · 56 km
FrankfurtFRA, HHN
2 h 0 m
no fares
BIO · 5 km
1 h 0 m
€138-162
2 stops
BRU · 56 km
MunichMUC
2 h 10 m
€203-242
1 stop
BIO · 5 km
1 h 20 m
no fares
BRU · 56 km
MalagaAGP
1 h 35 m
€77-114
BIO · 5 km
2 h 45 m
no fares
ANR · 54 km
SevillaSVQ
1 h 30 m
no fares
BIO · 5 km
2 h 40 m
no fares
CRL · 84 km
IstanbulIST, SAW
3 h 45 m
€192-214
BIO · 5 km
3 h 10 m
€161-193
BRU · 56 km
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
7 h 20 m
no fares
BIO · 5 km
7 h 35 m
no fares
BRU · 56 km
MarrakechRAK
2 h 15 m
no fares
BIO · 5 km
3 h 30 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

MeasureBilbaoGhent
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
Elevation19 m12 m
Main airportBilbao Airport (BIO)5 km from centre70 non-stop destinationsBrussels Airport (BRU)56 km from centre191 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year13 days14 days

By the numbers

MeasureBilbaoGhent
City population351,124272,657
People per km²8,4401,728
Museums within 10 km1730
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km15
Distinct cuisines in the centre5483
Swim season, months above 21 °C1 monthNone

Where else could you go?

Every comparison below shares a destination with this one, so you can follow Bilbao 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.