VacationSelector

Ghent or Portland?

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

Your match

Ghent
✓ Best match
50
match

Wins on beaches & swimming and museums & heritage with your weighting.

Portland
42
match

Wins on nightlife 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.

GhentPortland
Beaches & swimming. Ghent leads by 26 points.26
GhentPortland
Score260
Swim season months00
Beaches 10 km827
Coast distance32 km69 km
Water distance32 km
Places to eat. Portland leads by 4 points.4
GhentPortland
Score7074
Restaurants within 2 km of centre7641,011
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km4944
Museums & heritage. Ghent leads by 23 points.23
GhentPortland
Score5835
Museums within 10 km2423
Museums within 2 km of centre2015
Share of museums within 2 km %8365
Unesco sites within 50 km50
Nightlife. Portland leads by 9 points.9
GhentPortland
Score4958
Drinking venues within 4 km570942
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre446518
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %7855
Nightclubs within 4 km2632
Nature & day trips. Portland leads by 1 points.1
GhentPortland
Score3435
Protected land share 50 km %713
Landscape blanket share 50 km %43
Land share of disc %87100
Park area within 2 km84 hectares37 hectares
Good for families. Ghent leads by 16 points.16
GhentPortland
Score5034
Tourist attractions within 2 km198
Park area within 2 km84 hectares37 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km12
Sights concentration. Ghent leads by 11 points.11
GhentPortland
Score4635
Notable places within 2 km5529
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Ghent leads by 17 points.17
GhentPortland
Score6043
Price level global76.2100
Daily budget€180
Year-round weather. Portland leads by 9 points.9
GhentPortland
Score5665
Monthly daytime high6.4 °C to 22 °C7.9 °C to 27.7 °C
Monthly rainfall35 mm to 79 mm13 mm to 145 mm
Dry months13
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
Ghent
6
7
10
13
17
20
22
22
19
15
10
7
Portland
8
11
13
16
20
23
27
28
25
18
12
8
Sea temperature, °C
Ghent
6
6
6
9
12
16
18
19
18
15
11
8
Portland
No coastline within reach
Rainfall, mm
Ghent
59
52
44
35
51
64
74
79
72
76
78
74
Portland
128
94
101
75
65
41
13
14
39
87
138
145
Daylight, hours per day
Ghent
9
10
12
14
16
17
16
15
13
11
9
8
Portland
9
10
12
14
15
16
15
14
13
11
10
9
Sunshine, hours per day
Ghent
3
3
5
7
8
8
8
7
6
4
3
2
Portland
No sunshine record

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. Ghent: 1991-2020 normals, Vlissingen (44.9 km from centre). Portland: 1991-2020 normals, Portland International Airport (9.8 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromGhentPortland
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
7 h 35 m
no fares
BRU · 56 km
5 h 20 m
no fares
PDX · 10 km
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
1 h 5 m
€98-165
1 stop
BRU · 56 km
9 h 55 m
no fares
PDX · 10 km
ChicagoORD, MDW, DPA, PWK +1
8 h 30 m
no fares
BRU · 56 km
3 h 55 m
no fares
PDX · 10 km
FrankfurtFRA, HHN
1 h 0 m
€138-162
2 stops
BRU · 56 km
10 h 30 m
no fares
PDX · 10 km
WashingtonIAD, DCA
8 h 0 m
no fares
BRU · 56 km
5 h 5 m
no fares
PDX · 10 km
AtlantaATL, PDK
9 h 0 m
no fares
BRU · 56 km
4 h 45 m
no fares
PDX · 10 km
AmsterdamAMS
50 m
no fares
BRU · 56 km
10 h 5 m
no fares
PDX · 10 km
ReykjavikKEF, RKV
3 h 10 m
no fares
BRU · 56 km
7 h 45 m
no fares
PDX · 10 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

MeasureGhentPortland
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
Elevation12 m152 m
Main airportBrussels Airport (BRU)56 km from centre191 non-stop destinationsPortland International Airport (PDX)10 km from centre87 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year14 days12 days

By the numbers

MeasureGhentPortland
City population272,657652,503
People per km²1,7281,736
Museums within 10 km3017
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km50
Distinct cuisines in the centre8382
Swim season, months above 21 °CNone

Where else could you go?

Every comparison below shares a destination with this one, so you can follow Ghent or Portland 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. Ground elevations sampled from the Mapzen terrain tiles via OpenTopoData, merging SRTM, ASTER, NED, EU-DEM and national sources. 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.