VacationSelector

Belfast or Cape Town?

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

Your match

Belfast
48
match

Wins on nature & day trips and good for families with your weighting.

Cape Town
✓ Best match
57
match

Wins on year-round weather 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.

BelfastCape Town
Beaches & swimming. Cape Town leads by 12 points.12
BelfastCape Town
Score4860
Swim season months00
Beaches 10 km1029
Coast distance1 km1 km
Water distance1 km1 km
Places to eat. Cape Town leads by 11 points.11
BelfastCape Town
Score5667
Restaurants within 2 km of centre432650
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km3142
Museums & heritage. Cape Town leads by 25 points.25
BelfastCape Town
Score2954
Museums within 10 km1825
Museums within 2 km of centre620
Share of museums within 2 km %3380
Unesco sites within 50 km13
Nightlife. Belfast leads by 1 points.1
BelfastCape Town
Score4847
Drinking venues within 4 km550483
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre348389
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %6381
Nightclubs within 4 km2947
Nature & day trips. Belfast leads by 17 points.17
BelfastCape Town
Score5336
Protected land share 50 km %196
Landscape blanket share 50 km %130
Land share of disc %6542
Park area within 2 km68 hectares27 hectares
Good for families. Belfast leads by 12 points.12
BelfastCape Town
Score4836
Tourist attractions within 2 km1619
Park area within 2 km68 hectares27 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km20
Sights concentration. Cape Town leads by 3 points.3
BelfastCape Town
Score4245
Notable places within 2 km4351
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Cape Town leads by 31 points.31
BelfastCape Town
Score5485
Price level global84.940.5
Daily budget——
Year-round weather. Cape Town leads by 35 points.35
BelfastCape Town
Score5186
Monthly daytime high6.9 °C to 19 °C18 °C to 27.5 °C
Monthly rainfall55 mm to 89 mm10 mm to 97 mm
Dry months06
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
Belfast
7
8
10
12
15
18
19
19
17
13
10
7
Cape Town
27
28
26
24
21
18
18
18
20
22
24
26
Sea temperature, °C
Belfast
9
8
8
8
9
11
12
13
14
14
12
11
Cape Town
18
18
17
16
15
15
15
15
15
15
16
17
Rainfall, mm
Belfast
74
62
60
56
55
65
74
86
67
89
87
85
Cape Town
10
11
13
42
65
97
89
76
47
32
27
13
Daylight, hours per day
Belfast
8
10
12
14
16
17
17
15
13
11
9
7
Cape Town
14
13
12
11
10
10
10
11
12
13
14
14
Sunshine, hours per day
Belfast
2
2
3
5
6
5
5
5
4
3
2
2
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. Belfast: 1991-2020 normals, Belfast / Aldergrove Airport (19.4 km from centre). Cape Town: 1991-2020 normals, Cape Town Airport (17.5 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromBelfastCape Town
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
1 h 15 m
€72-142
BHD · 4 km
12 h 5 m
€634-815
CPT · 18 km
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
6 h 40 m
no fares
DUB · 132 km
15 h 25 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
1 h 40 m
no fares
BFS · 20 km
11 h 40 m
€742-801
2 stops
CPT · 18 km
AmsterdamAMS
1 h 35 m
no fares
BHD · 4 km
12 h 5 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km
FrankfurtFRA, HHN
1 h 55 m
€113-161
1 stop
DUB · 132 km
11 h 45 m
€632-724
1 stop
CPT · 18 km
AtlantaATL, PDK
8 h 5 m
no fares
DUB · 132 km
16 h 5 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km
ZurichZRH
2 h 5 m
€188-230
1 stop
DUB · 132 km
11 h 25 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km
MunichMUC
2 h 15 m
€200-272
1 stop
DUB · 132 km
11 h 30 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km
IstanbulIST, SAW
4 h 5 m
€183-239
DUB · 132 km
10 h 35 m
€717-799
1 stop
CPT · 18 km
DubaiDXB, DWC
7 h 40 m
no fares
DUB · 132 km
9 h 40 m
€611-615
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

MeasureBelfastCape Town
Official languageEnglishEnglish, Zulu, Xhosa, Afrikaans, Venda, Northern Sotho, Swazi, Tswana, Tsonga, Sesotho, Southern Ndebele, South African Sign Language
CurrencyPound Sterling (GBP)Rand (ZAR)
SocketsG230 V, 50 HzCMN230 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideLeftLeft
Time zoneUTC, UTC+1 in summerUTC+2
Emergency number112 or 999112
Elevation3 m5 m
Main airportGeorge Best Belfast City Airport (BHD)4 km from centre24 non-stop destinationsCape Town International Airport (CPT)18 km from centre44 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year10 days12 days

By the numbers

MeasureBelfastCape Town
City population345,0063,776,313
People per km²3,0001,538
Museums within 10 km822
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km13
Distinct cuisines in the centre4465
Swim season, months above 21 °CNoneNone

Where else could you go?

Every comparison below shares a destination with this one, so you can follow Belfast 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). 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. 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.