Being able to define a neighborhood or a concept of closeness is required, but the concept of distance is not required.
If you can define a distance a topological space is a metric space
If it is locally euclidean it may be a manifold.
Really the union and finite intersection of subsets is the formal way of showing something is a topological space. Too har do describe here but that is where the concept of continuity arises.
In the usual mathematical sense of the words you are using, topologies aren’t even the right type of object to admit a notion of continuity. Your statement doesn’t even make sense. It’s maps between them that can be continuous.
In fact, a topological space is sort of the minimal amount of structure a set needs to have to be able to talk about continuity of maps to/from it.
