VacationSelector

Bruges or San Jose?

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.

San Jose
39
match

Wins on nature & day trips 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.

BrugesSan Jose
Beaches & swimming. Bruges and San Jose are level on 8.
BrugesSan Jose
Score88
Swim season months00
Beaches 10 km11
Coast distance14 km14 km
Water distance14 km14 km
Places to eat. Bruges leads by 16 points.16
BrugesSan Jose
Score5741
Restaurants within 2 km of centre443313
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km3216
Museums & heritage. Bruges leads by 31 points.31
BrugesSan Jose
Score5726
Museums within 10 km3020
Museums within 2 km of centre249
Share of museums within 2 km %8045
Unesco sites within 50 km30
Nightlife. Bruges leads by 3 points.3
BrugesSan Jose
Score3431
Drinking venues within 4 km292231
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre23388
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %8038
Nightclubs within 4 km816
Nature & day trips. San Jose leads by 44 points.44
BrugesSan Jose
Score2670
Protected land share 50 km %226
Landscape blanket share 50 km %02
Land share of disc %6591
Park area within 2 km59 hectares101 hectares
Good for families. Bruges leads by 27 points.27
BrugesSan Jose
Score6033
Tourist attractions within 2 km522
Park area within 2 km59 hectares101 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km12
Sights concentration. Bruges leads by 26 points.26
BrugesSan Jose
Score4014
Notable places within 2 km409
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Bruges leads by 17 points.17
BrugesSan Jose
Score6043
Price level global76.2100
Daily budget€180
Year-round weather. San Jose leads by 29 points.29
BrugesSan Jose
Score5685
Monthly daytime high6.4 °C to 22 °C15.4 °C to 26.8 °C
Monthly rainfall35 mm to 79 mm0 mm to 78 mm
Dry months18
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
San Jose
15
17
19
21
23
26
27
27
27
24
19
17
Sea temperature, °C
Bruges
7
6
7
9
12
15
18
19
18
15
11
8
San Jose
12
12
12
12
12
13
14
15
15
14
13
13
Rainfall, mm
Bruges
59
52
44
35
51
64
74
79
72
76
78
74
San Jose
50
78
51
25
9
2
0
0
2
15
33
62
Daylight, hours per day
Bruges
8
10
12
14
16
17
16
15
13
11
9
8
San Jose
10
11
12
13
14
15
15
14
13
11
10
10
Sunshine, hours per day
Bruges
3
3
5
7
8
8
8
7
6
4
3
2
San Jose
No sunshine record

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. Bruges: 1991-2020 normals, Vlissingen (37.4 km from centre). San Jose: 1991-2020 normals, San Jose / Santa Clara Trailer Village (8.2 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromBrugesSan Jose
MadridMAD
2 h 15 m
€98-170
BRU · 94 km
11 h 40 m
no fares
SFO · 57 km
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
7 h 35 m
no fares
BRU · 94 km
5 h 35 m
€286-328
1 stop
SFO · 57 km
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
1 h 5 m
€98-165
1 stop
BRU · 94 km
10 h 50 m
no fares
SFO · 57 km
FrankfurtFRA, HHN
1 h 0 m
€138-162
2 stops
BRU · 94 km
11 h 25 m
no fares
SFO · 57 km
RomeFCO, CIA
2 h 5 m
€87-136
1 stop
BRU · 94 km
12 h 30 m
no fares
SFO · 57 km
TokyoHND, NRT
11 h 45 m
no fares
BRU · 94 km
10 h 25 m
no fares
SFO · 57 km
IstanbulIST, SAW
3 h 10 m
€161-193
BRU · 94 km
13 h 20 m
no fares
SFO · 57 km
LisbonLIS
2 h 40 m
€120-263
BRU · 94 km
11 h 25 m
no fares
SFO · 57 km
DublinDUB
1 h 35 m
no fares
BRU · 94 km
10 h 20 m
no fares
SFO · 57 km
DubaiDXB, DWC
6 h 45 m
no fares
BRU · 94 km
16 h 0 m
€1,005-1027
1 stop
SFO · 57 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

MeasureBrugesSan Jose
Official languageFrench, German, Dutch
CurrencyEuro (EUR)US Dollar (USD)
SocketsCE230 V, 50 HzAB120 V, 60 Hz
Driving sideRightRight
Time zoneUTC+1, UTC+2 in summerUTC-8, UTC-7 in summer
Emergency number112911
Elevation2 m25 m
Main airportBrussels Airport (BRU)94 km from centre191 non-stop destinationsMineta San Jose International Airport (SJC)8 km from centre17 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year14 days13 days

By the numbers

MeasureBrugesSan Jose
City population118,5091,013,240
People per km²8402,167
Museums within 10 km3819
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km30
Distinct cuisines in the centre5130
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 San Jose 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. Exchange rates via Frankfurter, based on European Central Bank reference rates. 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.