VacationSelector

Alicante or Cape Town?

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, 1 point apart

Alicante
56
match

Wins on beaches & swimming and good for families with your weighting.

Cape Town
57
match

Wins on sights concentration and value for money 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.

AlicanteCape Town
Beaches & swimming. Alicante leads by 17 points.17
AlicanteCape Town
Score7760
Swim season months50
Beaches 10 km3329
Coast distance1 km1 km
Water distance1 km1 km
Places to eat. Cape Town leads by 1 points.1
AlicanteCape Town
Score6667
Restaurants within 2 km of centre867650
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km3142
Museums & heritage. Cape Town leads by 12 points.12
AlicanteCape Town
Score4254
Museums within 10 km1425
Museums within 2 km of centre1120
Share of museums within 2 km %7980
Unesco sites within 50 km23
Nightlife. Alicante leads by 4 points.4
AlicanteCape Town
Score5147
Drinking venues within 4 km591483
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre488389
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %8381
Nightclubs within 4 km5447
Nature & day trips. Alicante leads by 4 points.4
AlicanteCape Town
Score4036
Protected land share 50 km %76
Landscape blanket share 50 km %00
Land share of disc %5942
Park area within 2 km60 hectares27 hectares
Good for families. Alicante leads by 6 points.6
AlicanteCape Town
Score4236
Tourist attractions within 2 km1319
Park area within 2 km60 hectares27 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km10
Sights concentration. Cape Town leads by 19 points.19
AlicanteCape Town
Score2645
Notable places within 2 km1851
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Cape Town leads by 14 points.14
AlicanteCape Town
Score7185
Price level global60.840.5
Daily budget€122
Year-round weather. Alicante leads by 1 points.1
AlicanteCape Town
Score8786
Monthly daytime high17 °C to 31.1 °C18 °C to 27.5 °C
Monthly rainfall3 mm to 52 mm10 mm to 97 mm
Dry months116
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
Alicante
17
18
20
22
24
28
30
31
29
25
21
18
Cape Town
27
28
26
24
21
18
18
18
20
22
24
26
Sea temperature, °C
Alicante
15
14
15
16
18
22
25
26
25
22
19
16
Cape Town
18
18
17
16
15
15
15
15
15
15
16
17
Rainfall, mm
Alicante
21
18
25
34
21
8
3
12
52
32
34
23
Cape Town
10
11
13
42
65
97
89
76
47
32
27
13
Daylight, hours per day
Alicante
10
11
12
13
14
15
15
14
13
11
10
10
Cape Town
14
13
12
11
10
10
10
11
12
13
14
14
Sunshine, hours per day
Alicante
6
6
8
8
10
10
11
10
8
7
6
6
Cape Town
12
10
9
8
6
6
6
7
8
9
10
11

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. Alicante: 1991-2020 normals, Alicante (2.8 km from centre). Cape Town: 1991-2020 normals, Cape Town Airport (17.5 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromAlicanteCape Town
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
2 h 25 m
€46-56
ALC · 10 km
12 h 5 m
€634-815
CPT · 18 km
AmsterdamAMS
2 h 35 m
€150-169
1 stop
ALC · 10 km
12 h 5 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
2 h 5 m
€85-109
ALC · 10 km
11 h 40 m
€742-801
2 stops
CPT · 18 km
FrankfurtFRA, HHN
2 h 15 m
€128-199
1 stop
VLC · 127 km
11 h 45 m
€632-724
1 stop
CPT · 18 km
ZurichZRH
2 h 10 m
€178-205
1 stop
ALC · 10 km
11 h 25 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km
MunichMUC
2 h 25 m
no fares
ALC · 10 km
11 h 30 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km
IstanbulIST, SAW
3 h 35 m
€167-378
VLC · 127 km
10 h 35 m
€717-799
1 stop
CPT · 18 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

MeasureAlicanteCape Town
Official languageSpanishEnglish, Zulu, Xhosa, Afrikaans, Venda, Northern Sotho, Swazi, Tswana, Tsonga, Sesotho, Southern Ndebele, South African Sign Language
CurrencyEuro (EUR)Rand (ZAR)
SocketsCF230 V, 50 HzCMN230 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideRightLeft
Time zoneUTC+1, UTC+2 in summerUTC+2
Emergency number112112
Elevation3 m5 m
Main airportAlicante-Elche Miguel Hernández Airport (ALC)10 km from centre124 non-stop destinationsCape Town International Airport (CPT)18 km from centre44 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year13 days12 days

By the numbers

MeasureAlicanteCape Town
City population366,2213,776,313
People per km²1,8191,538
Museums within 10 km822
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km23
Distinct cuisines in the centre5265
Swim season, months above 21 °C5 monthsNone

Where else could you go?

Every comparison below shares a destination with this one, so you can follow Alicante or Cape Town 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. 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.