VacationSelector

Brussels or Edinburgh?

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

Your match

Too close to call, 2 points apart

Brussels
56
match

Wins on museums & heritage and sights concentration with your weighting.

Edinburgh
58
match

Wins on beaches & swimming and good for families 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.

BrusselsEdinburgh
Beaches & swimming. Edinburgh leads by 55 points.55
BrusselsEdinburgh
Score055
Swim season months00
Beaches 10 km020
Coast distance56 km3 km
Water distance3 km
Places to eat. Brussels leads by 11 points.11
BrusselsEdinburgh
Score8170
Restaurants within 2 km of centre1,7791,023
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km4435
Museums & heritage. Brussels leads by 23 points.23
BrusselsEdinburgh
Score8057
Museums within 10 km12030
Museums within 2 km of centre5922
Share of museums within 2 km %4973
Unesco sites within 50 km103
Nightlife. Brussels leads by 4 points.4
BrusselsEdinburgh
Score6864
Drinking venues within 4 km1,4141,193
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre862884
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %6174
Nightclubs within 4 km8465
Nature & day trips. Edinburgh leads by 4 points.4
BrusselsEdinburgh
Score3135
Protected land share 50 km %62
Landscape blanket share 50 km %11
Land share of disc %10085
Park area within 2 km65 hectares166 hectares
Good for families. Edinburgh leads by 16 points.16
BrusselsEdinburgh
Score5672
Tourist attractions within 2 km2887
Park area within 2 km65 hectares166 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km20
Sights concentration. Brussels leads by 13 points.13
BrusselsEdinburgh
Score7360
Notable places within 2 km254126
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Brussels leads by 6 points.6
BrusselsEdinburgh
Score6054
Price level global76.284.9
Daily budget€180
Year-round weather. Brussels leads by 6 points.6
BrusselsEdinburgh
Score5751
Monthly daytime high6.1 °C to 23.3 °C6.6 °C to 18.8 °C
Monthly rainfall47 mm to 90 mm43 mm to 80 mm
Dry months00
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
Brussels
6
7
11
15
18
21
23
23
20
15
10
6
Edinburgh
7
7
9
12
14
17
19
19
17
13
9
7
Sea temperature, °C
Brussels
No coastline within reach
Edinburgh
7
6
6
7
10
12
14
14
13
12
10
8
Rainfall, mm
Brussels
77
67
59
47
61
72
80
90
67
71
75
89
Edinburgh
62
47
47
43
49
63
65
69
55
80
68
63
Daylight, hours per day
Brussels
9
10
12
14
16
16
16
15
13
11
9
8
Edinburgh
8
10
12
14
16
18
17
15
13
11
8
7
Sunshine, hours per day
Brussels
2
2
4
6
6
7
7
6
5
4
2
1
Edinburgh
2
3
4
5
6
5
5
5
4
3
3
2

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. Brussels: 1991-2020 normals, Uccle (5.2 km from centre). Edinburgh: 1991-2020 normals, Edinburgh Airport (10 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromBrusselsEdinburgh
MadridMAD
2 h 15 m
€98-170
BRU · 11 km
2 h 40 m
no fares
EDI · 11 km
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
1 h 5 m
€98-165
1 stop
BRU · 11 km
1 h 20 m
€41-45
EDI · 11 km
BarcelonaBCN
1 h 55 m
€47-116
BRU · 11 km
2 h 40 m
€58-103
1 stop
EDI · 11 km
MilanMXP, BGY, LIN
1 h 25 m
€36-101
BRU · 11 km
2 h 20 m
€75-101
1 stop
EDI · 11 km
MalagaAGP
2 h 45 m
€177-223
BRU · 11 km
3 h 10 m
no fares
EDI · 11 km
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
7 h 35 m
no fares
BRU · 11 km
6 h 50 m
no fares
EDI · 11 km
AlicanteALC
2 h 25 m
€114-153
1 stop
BRU · 11 km
3 h 0 m
€106
EDI · 11 km
ViennaVIE
1 h 45 m
€93-156
BRU · 11 km
2 h 35 m
€150-240
1 stop
EDI · 11 km
RomeFCO, CIA
2 h 5 m
€87-136
1 stop
BRU · 11 km
2 h 55 m
€99-141
1 stop
EDI · 11 km
DubaiDXB, DWC
6 h 45 m
no fares
BRU · 11 km
7 h 30 m
no fares
EDI · 11 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

MeasureBrusselsEdinburgh
Official languageFrench, German, DutchEnglish
CurrencyEuro (EUR)Pound Sterling (GBP)
SocketsCE230 V, 50 HzG230 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideRightLeft
Time zoneUTC+1, UTC+2 in summerUTC, UTC+1 in summer
Emergency number112112 or 999
Elevation70 m47 m
Main airportBrussels Airport (BRU)11 km from centre191 non-stop destinationsEdinburgh Airport (EDI)11 km from centre158 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year14 days10 days

By the numbers

MeasureBrusselsEdinburgh
City population195,546488,050
People per km²5,9081,884
Museums within 10 km10532
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km103
Distinct cuisines in the centre10978
Swim season, months above 21 °CNone

Where else could you go?

Every comparison below shares a destination with this one, so you can follow Brussels or Edinburgh 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. 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. Sea surface temperature from NOAA OISST v2.1, NOAA Physical Sciences Laboratory. 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.