VacationSelector

Bordeaux or Cape Town?

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

Your match

Bordeaux
49
match

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

Cape Town
✓ Best match
57
match

Wins on beaches & swimming 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.

BordeauxCape Town
Beaches & swimming. Cape Town leads by 60 points.60
BordeauxCape Town
Score060
Swim season months00
Beaches 10 km429
Coast distance18 km1 km
Water distance1 km
Places to eat. Bordeaux leads by 1 points.1
BordeauxCape Town
Score6867
Restaurants within 2 km of centre975650
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km3242
Museums & heritage. Bordeaux leads by 1 points.1
BordeauxCape Town
Score5554
Museums within 10 km3525
Museums within 2 km of centre1720
Share of museums within 2 km %4980
Unesco sites within 50 km43
Nightlife. Bordeaux leads by 1 points.1
BordeauxCape Town
Score4847
Drinking venues within 4 km546483
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre427389
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %7881
Nightclubs within 4 km3247
Nature & day trips. Bordeaux leads by 15 points.15
BordeauxCape Town
Score5136
Protected land share 50 km %356
Landscape blanket share 50 km %350
Land share of disc %8542
Park area within 2 km43 hectares27 hectares
Good for families. Bordeaux leads by 9 points.9
BordeauxCape Town
Score4536
Tourist attractions within 2 km2119
Park area within 2 km43 hectares27 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km10
Sights concentration. Bordeaux and Cape Town are level on 45.
BordeauxCape Town
Score4545
Notable places within 2 km5151
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Cape Town leads by 23 points.23
BordeauxCape Town
Score6285
Price level global73.740.5
Daily budget€160
Year-round weather. Cape Town leads by 18 points.18
BordeauxCape Town
Score6886
Monthly daytime high10.5 °C to 27.6 °C18 °C to 27.5 °C
Monthly rainfall47 mm to 114 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
Bordeaux
11
12
16
18
22
25
27
28
24
20
14
11
Cape Town
27
28
26
24
21
18
18
18
20
22
24
26
Sea temperature, °C
Bordeaux
No coastline within reach
Cape Town
18
18
17
16
15
15
15
15
15
15
16
17
Rainfall, mm
Bordeaux
87
67
63
76
71
71
47
57
81
83
114
107
Cape Town
10
11
13
42
65
97
89
76
47
32
27
13
Daylight, hours per day
Bordeaux
9
10
12
14
15
16
15
14
13
11
10
9
Cape Town
14
13
12
11
10
10
10
11
12
13
14
14
Sunshine, hours per day
Bordeaux
3
4
6
6
7
8
8
8
7
5
3
3
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. Bordeaux: 1991-2020 normals, Bordeaux / Merignac (9.5 km from centre). Cape Town: 1991-2020 normals, Cape Town Airport (17.5 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromBordeauxCape Town
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
1 h 15 m
€114-148
BOD · 11 km
11 h 40 m
€742-801
2 stops
CPT · 18 km
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
1 h 30 m
€46-73
BOD · 11 km
12 h 5 m
€634-815
CPT · 18 km
AmsterdamAMS
1 h 45 m
no fares
BOD · 11 km
12 h 5 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km
FrankfurtFRA, HHN
1 h 45 m
no fares
BOD · 11 km
11 h 45 m
€632-724
1 stop
CPT · 18 km
IstanbulIST, SAW
3 h 30 m
€237-323
BOD · 11 km
10 h 35 m
€717-799
1 stop
CPT · 18 km
ZurichZRH
1 h 35 m
no fares
BOD · 11 km
11 h 25 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km
MunichMUC
1 h 55 m
no fares
BOD · 11 km
11 h 30 m
no fares
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 2026-09 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

MeasureBordeauxCape Town
Official languageFrenchEnglish, Zulu, Xhosa, Afrikaans, Venda, Northern Sotho, Swazi, Tswana, Tsonga, Sesotho, Southern Ndebele, South African Sign Language
CurrencyEuro (EUR)Rand (ZAR)
SocketsCE230 V, 50 HzCMN230 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideRightLeft
Time zoneUTC+1, UTC+2 in summerUTC+2
Emergency number112112
Elevation1 m5 m
Main airportBordeaux–Mérignac Airport (BOD)11 km from centre94 non-stop destinationsCape Town International Airport (CPT)18 km from centre44 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year11 days12 days

By the numbers

MeasureBordeauxCape Town
City population267,9913,776,313
People per km²5,4251,538
Museums within 10 km1822
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km43
Distinct cuisines in the centre8165
Swim season, months above 21 °CNone

Where else could you go?

Every comparison below shares a destination with this one, so you can follow Bordeaux 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. 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. Sea surface temperature from NOAA OISST v2.1, NOAA Physical Sciences Laboratory. 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.