In your country, are there cities near to each other that nevertheless have very different accents?

[Tooting Carmen]

I can think of quite a few examples in the UK:

- Cardiff and Bristol.
- Birmingham and Leicester.
- Nottingham and Sheffield.
- Liverpool and Manchester.

[Erronkari]

Hummmm probably Mendoza, San Juan and San Luis...
In Uruguay between Tacuarembo and Rivera (120km) accent changes a little probably due to brazilian influence in Rivera.

[The Blade]

- Vraca and Pleven
- Vraca and Sofia
- Sofia and Pernik
- Plovdiv and Smolyan
- Plovdiv and Rakovski
- Ruse and Varna
- Ruse and Kavarna
Just some examples.

[Tooting Carmen]

Hummmm probably Mendoza, San Juan and San Luis...

Yey, you're back.

[Erronkari]

Yey, you're back.

I've never gone bro!

[Tooting Carmen]

Edinburgh and Glasgow is another possible example, though I would like Graham's opinion about that.

[ixulescu]

Not in Romania. Most accents are very mild and perfectly understandable.

There is a slight exception when it comes to Iasi, former capital of Moldova, a city close to the border with Rep. of Moldova. There the accent is similar to that of RM, because in the not so distant past, close to half of the population of Iasi was Jewish who spoke Russian natively. Russian influence results in the same accent and sentence word order in Romanian - it's very noticeable, but still just as easy to comprehend.

[Tacitus]

In the US, New York and Philadelphia is the first that comes to mind. In Italy's case the dialect or even language can vary from one city to its neighbor, never mind the accent.

[Ouistreham]

Very interesting question.
Mainly agricultural regions like used to be Central-Western France should logically have preserved more traditional ways of speaking than the heavily industrial ones.
But just the opposite happened — though it's counter-intuitive.

I observed long time ago that actually, from Bourges and Orléans up to the Western tip of Brittany, there are over 500 or 600 km of distance no audible difference between Orléans, Tours, Angers, Nantes, Rennes, Brest etc. Some specific dialectal words may appear here and there, especially among farmers, but urban people all use the same standard French, devoid of any particular accent.

It's all different around Lyon, where a traumatic industrialization wave took place 200 years ago. Lyon, Macon, Oyonnax, Chambéry, Annecy, Grenoble, Saint-Etienne, Clermont-Ferrand etc., every city has its own urban accent that can't be confused with the one prevailing 30 km away. Add to this Valence, where Southern influences begin to surface, and it continues into Switzerland (Geneva, lausanne, La Chaud-de-Fonds).
(The phenomenon may have been encouraged by the fact those districts are the so-called Franco-Provençal area, intermediate between Occitan and "normal" French).

It's like the Industrial Revolution had shaped new, specific urban ethnicities.
(Unless it means that urban working classes are more culturally conservative than rural people.)

Same along the Belgian border: there are big differences between Charleville, Valenciennes, Lille and Dunkirk, and —in Wallonia— between Mouscron, Tournai, Mons, Charleroi, Liège.

I wouldn't be surprised if similar situations are observed in the part of England that experienced early industrialization — Midlands, Lancashire, Yorkshire.

[Tooting Carmen]

Very interesting question.
Mainly agricultural regions like used to be Central-Western France should logically have preserved more traditional ways of speaking than the heavily industrial ones.
But just the opposite happened — though it's counter-intuitive.

I observed long time ago that actually, from Bourges and Orléans up to the Western tip of Brittany, there are over 500 or 600 km of distance no audible difference between Orléans, Tours, Angers, Nantes, Rennes, Brest etc. Some specific dialectal words may appear here and there, especially among farmers, but urban people all use the same standard French, devoid of any particular accent.

It's all different around Lyon, where experienced a traumatic industrialization wave 200 years ago. Lyon, Macon, Oyonnax, Chambéry, Annecy, Grenoble, Saint-Etienne, Clermont-Ferrand etc., every city has its own urban accent that can't be confused with the one prevailing 30 km away. Add to this Valence, where Southern influences begin to surface, and it continues into Switzerland (Geneva, lausanne, La Chaud-de-Fonds).
(The phenomenon may have been encouraged by the fact those districts are the so-called Franco-Provençal area, intermediate between Occitan and "normal" French).

It's like the Industrial Revolution had shaped new, specific urban ethnicities.

Same along the Belgian border: there are big differences between Charleville, Valenciennes, Lille and Dunkirk, and —in Wallonia— between Mouscron, Tournai, Mons, Charleroi, Liège.

I wouldn't be surprised if similar situations are observed in the part of England that experienced early industrialization — Midlands, Lancashire, Yorkshire.

In England, the Midlands' main division is between West and East (hence why I said Birmingham-Leicester in the OP, which are forty miles apart). Most accents in Lancashire and Yorkshire sound relatively similar, with Merseyside (historically a part of Lancashire) being the major outlier, mainly due to the exceptionally large Irish and Welsh influences in Liverpool.