VacationSelector

Portland or Sofia?

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

Your match

Portland
42
match

Wins on places to eat and year-round weather with your weighting.

Sofia
✓ Best match
56
match

Wins on value for money and museums & heritage 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.

PortlandSofia
Beaches & swimming. Portland and Sofia are level on 0.
PortlandSofia
Score00
Swim season months00
Beaches 10 km270
Coast distance69 km214 km
Water distance
Places to eat. Portland leads by 10 points.10
PortlandSofia
Score7464
Restaurants within 2 km of centre1,011845
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km4428
Museums & heritage. Sofia leads by 22 points.22
PortlandSofia
Score3557
Museums within 10 km2351
Museums within 2 km of centre1540
Share of museums within 2 km %6578
Unesco sites within 50 km01
Nightlife. Sofia leads by 3 points.3
PortlandSofia
Score5861
Drinking venues within 4 km942958
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre518608
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %5563
Nightclubs within 4 km32102
Nature & day trips. Sofia leads by 16 points.16
PortlandSofia
Score3551
Protected land share 50 km %1312
Landscape blanket share 50 km %34
Land share of disc %100100
Park area within 2 km37 hectares229 hectares
Good for families. Sofia leads by 21 points.21
PortlandSofia
Score3455
Tourist attractions within 2 km820
Park area within 2 km37 hectares229 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km20
Sights concentration. Sofia leads by 22 points.22
PortlandSofia
Score3557
Notable places within 2 km29104
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Sofia leads by 56 points.56
PortlandSofia
Score4399
Price level global10021.4
Daily budget€77
Year-round weather. Portland leads by 1 points.1
PortlandSofia
Score6564
Monthly daytime high7.9 °C to 27.7 °C3.5 °C to 28.4 °C
Monthly rainfall13 mm to 145 mm36 mm to 78 mm
Dry months33
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
Portland
8
11
13
16
20
23
27
28
25
18
12
8
Sofia
4
7
11
17
21
25
28
28
23
18
11
5
Rainfall, mm
Portland
128
94
101
75
65
41
13
14
39
87
138
145
Sofia
36
36
45
52
73
78
64
56
54
56
38
41
Daylight, hours per day
Portland
9
10
12
14
15
16
15
14
13
11
10
9
Sofia
9
11
12
13
15
15
15
14
13
11
10
9
Sunshine, hours per day
Portland
No sunshine record
Sofia
3
4
6
6
8
9
10
10
7
5
3
2

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. Portland: 1991-2020 normals, Portland International Airport (9.8 km from centre). Sofia: 1991-2020 normals, Sofia Observ. (7.3 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromPortlandSofia
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
9 h 55 m
no fares
PDX · 10 km
3 h 5 m
€70-85
1 stop
SOF · 8 km
FrankfurtFRA, HHN
10 h 30 m
no fares
PDX · 10 km
2 h 20 m
€130-210
1 stop
SOF · 8 km
AmsterdamAMS
10 h 5 m
no fares
PDX · 10 km
2 h 45 m
no fares
SOF · 8 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

MeasurePortlandSofia
Official languageBulgarian
CurrencyUS Dollar (USD)Euro (EUR)
SocketsAB120 V, 60 HzCF230 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideRightRight
Time zoneUTC-8, UTC-7 in summerUTC+2, UTC+3 in summer
Emergency number911112
Elevation152 m560 m
Main airportPortland International Airport (PDX)10 km from centre87 non-stop destinationsSofia Airport (SOF)8 km from centre94 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year12 days15 days

By the numbers

MeasurePortlandSofia
City population652,5031,213,134
People per km²1,7362,466
Museums within 10 km1742
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km01
Distinct cuisines in the centre8251

Where else could you go?

Every comparison below shares a destination with this one, so you can follow Portland or Sofia 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). Public holidays from Nager.Date (MIT). Exchange rates via Frankfurter, based on European Central Bank reference rates. 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. Tourism statistics from Eurostat, © European Union, reused under CC BY 4.0. 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.