VacationSelector

Bruges or Cork?

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

Your match

Bruges
✓ Best match
44
match

Wins on museums & heritage and good for families with your weighting.

Cork
38
match

Wins on nature & day trips and beaches & swimming 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.

BrugesCork
Beaches & swimming. Cork leads by 20 points.20
BrugesCork
Score828
Swim season months00
Beaches 10 km11
Coast distance14 km3 km
Water distance14 km3 km
Places to eat. Bruges leads by 7 points.7
BrugesCork
Score5750
Restaurants within 2 km of centre443224
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km3235
Museums & heritage. Bruges leads by 34 points.34
BrugesCork
Score5723
Museums within 10 km3010
Museums within 2 km of centre248
Share of museums within 2 km %8080
Unesco sites within 50 km30
Nightlife. Cork leads by 4 points.4
BrugesCork
Score3438
Drinking venues within 4 km292361
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre233292
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %8081
Nightclubs within 4 km89
Nature & day trips. Cork leads by 26 points.26
BrugesCork
Score2652
Protected land share 50 km %2—
Landscape blanket share 50 km %00
Land share of disc %6574
Park area within 2 km59 hectares48 hectares
Good for families. Bruges leads by 33 points.33
BrugesCork
Score6027
Tourist attractions within 2 km527
Park area within 2 km59 hectares48 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km10
Sights concentration. Bruges leads by 18 points.18
BrugesCork
Score4022
Notable places within 2 km4014
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Bruges leads by 3 points.3
BrugesCork
Score6057
Price level global76.280.2
Daily budget€180€187
Year-round weather. Bruges leads by 7 points.7
BrugesCork
Score5649
Monthly daytime high6.4 °C to 22 °C8.3 °C to 18.6 °C
Monthly rainfall35 mm to 79 mm78 mm to 140 mm
Dry months10
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
Bruges
6
7
10
13
17
20
22
22
19
15
10
7
Cork
8
9
10
12
15
17
19
19
17
13
10
9
Sea temperature, °C
Bruges
7
6
7
9
12
15
18
19
18
15
11
8
Cork
10
9
9
10
12
14
16
16
16
14
12
11
Rainfall, mm
Bruges
59
52
44
35
51
64
74
79
72
76
78
74
Cork
132
100
92
85
78
88
86
98
91
140
125
134
Daylight, hours per day
Bruges
8
10
12
14
16
17
16
15
13
11
9
8
Cork
8
10
12
14
16
17
16
15
13
11
9
8
Sunshine, hours per day
Bruges
3
3
5
7
8
8
8
7
6
4
3
2
Cork
2
2
4
5
6
6
5
5
4
3
2
2

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. Bruges: 1991-2020 normals, Vlissingen (37.4 km from centre). Cork: 1991-2020 normals, Cork Airport (5.6 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromBrugesCork
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
1 h 5 m
€98-165
1 stop
BRU · 94 km
1 h 20 m
no fares
ORK · 7 km
MadridMAD
2 h 15 m
€98-170
BRU · 94 km
2 h 20 m
no fares
SNN · 94 km
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
7 h 35 m
no fares
BRU · 94 km
6 h 30 m
no fares
SNN · 94 km
RomeFCO, CIA
2 h 5 m
€87-136
1 stop
BRU · 94 km
2 h 55 m
no fares
ORK · 7 km
DublinDUB
1 h 35 m
no fares
BRU · 94 km
1 h 0 m
no fares
KIR · 78 km
FrankfurtFRA, HHN
1 h 0 m
€138-162
2 stops
BRU · 94 km
2 h 10 m
no fares
KIR · 78 km
MilanMXP, BGY, LIN
1 h 25 m
€36-101
BRU · 94 km
2 h 20 m
no fares
ORK · 7 km
AmsterdamAMS
50 m
no fares
BRU · 94 km
1 h 45 m
no fares
ORK · 7 km
MalagaAGP
2 h 40 m
no fares
OST · 24 km
2 h 40 m
no fares
ORK · 7 km
ManchesterMAN
1 h 20 m
no fares
CRL · 120 km
1 h 10 m
no fares
ORK · 7 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

MeasureBrugesCork
Official languageFrench, German, DutchEnglish, Irish
CurrencyEuro (EUR)Euro (EUR)
SocketsCE230 V, 50 HzG230 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideRightLeft
Time zoneUTC+1, UTC+2 in summerUTC, UTC+1 in summer
Emergency number112112
Elevation2 m0 m
Main airportBrussels Airport (BRU)94 km from centre191 non-stop destinationsCork International Airport (ORK)7 km from centre46 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year14 days11 days

By the numbers

MeasureBrugesCork
City population118,509222,333
People per km²8405,961
Museums within 10 km385
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km30
Distinct cuisines in the centre5149
Swim season, months above 21 °CNoneNone

Where else could you go?

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