VacationSelector

Bruges or Galway?

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.

Galway
39
match

Wins on beaches & swimming and nature & day trips 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.

BrugesGalway
Beaches & swimming. Galway leads by 43 points.43
BrugesGalway
Score851
Swim season months00
Beaches 10 km113
Coast distance14 km1 km
Water distance14 km1 km
Places to eat. Bruges leads by 20 points.20
BrugesGalway
Score5737
Restaurants within 2 km of centre443173
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km3220
Museums & heritage. Bruges leads by 37 points.37
BrugesGalway
Score5720
Museums within 10 km305
Museums within 2 km of centre245
Share of museums within 2 km %80100
Unesco sites within 50 km30
Nightlife. Bruges leads by 8 points.8
BrugesGalway
Score3426
Drinking venues within 4 km292185
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre233153
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %8083
Nightclubs within 4 km88
Nature & day trips. Galway leads by 29 points.29
BrugesGalway
Score2655
Protected land share 50 km %2—
Landscape blanket share 50 km %00
Land share of disc %6585
Park area within 2 km59 hectares65 hectares
Good for families. Bruges leads by 35 points.35
BrugesGalway
Score6025
Tourist attractions within 2 km525
Park area within 2 km59 hectares65 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km10
Sights concentration. Bruges leads by 18 points.18
BrugesGalway
Score4022
Notable places within 2 km4014
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Bruges leads by 3 points.3
BrugesGalway
Score6057
Price level global76.280.2
Daily budget€180€187
Year-round weather. Bruges leads by 2 points.2
BrugesGalway
Score5654
Monthly daytime high6.4 °C to 22 °C8.9 °C to 19.6 °C
Monthly rainfall35 mm to 79 mm63 mm to 113 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
Galway
9
10
11
14
16
19
20
19
18
14
11
9
Sea temperature, °C
Bruges
7
6
7
9
12
15
18
19
18
15
11
8
Galway
9
9
9
10
12
14
16
16
15
14
12
10
Rainfall, mm
Bruges
59
52
44
35
51
64
74
79
72
76
78
74
Galway
100
87
76
63
63
72
76
89
77
101
104
113
Daylight, hours per day
Bruges
8
10
12
14
16
17
16
15
13
11
9
8
Galway
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
Galway
2
2
4
5
6
5
4
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). Galway: 1991-2020 normals, Shannon Airport (64.2 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromBrugesGalway
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
1 h 5 m
€98-165
1 stop
BRU · 94 km
1 h 20 m
no fares
SNN · 64 km
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
7 h 35 m
no fares
BRU · 94 km
6 h 30 m
no fares
SNN · 64 km
MadridMAD
2 h 15 m
€98-170
BRU · 94 km
2 h 20 m
no fares
SNN · 64 km
DublinDUB
1 h 35 m
no fares
BRU · 94 km
1 h 0 m
no fares
KIR · 125 km
RomeFCO, CIA
2 h 5 m
€87-136
1 stop
BRU · 94 km
3 h 0 m
no fares
SNN · 64 km
FrankfurtFRA, HHN
1 h 0 m
€138-162
2 stops
BRU · 94 km
2 h 10 m
no fares
KIR · 125 km
MilanMXP, BGY, LIN
1 h 25 m
€36-101
BRU · 94 km
2 h 30 m
no fares
NOC · 73 km
AlicanteALC
2 h 25 m
no fares
OST · 24 km
2 h 40 m
no fares
SNN · 64 km
MalagaAGP
2 h 40 m
no fares
OST · 24 km
2 h 50 m
no fares
SNN · 64 km
KrakowKRK
2 h 5 m
no fares
LIL · 72 km
3 h 0 m
no fares
SNN · 64 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

MeasureBrugesGalway
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 m25 m
Main airportBrussels Airport (BRU)94 km from centre191 non-stop destinationsShannon Airport (SNN)64 km from centre36 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year14 days11 days

By the numbers

MeasureBrugesGalway
City population118,50983,456
People per km²8401,563
Museums within 10 km384
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km30
Distinct cuisines in the centre5125
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 Galway 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.