VacationSelector

Brussels or Cancun?

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

Your match

Brussels
✓ Best match
56
match

Wins on sights concentration and museums & heritage with your weighting.

Cancun
50
match

Wins on beaches & swimming and year-round weather 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.

BrusselsCancun
Beaches & swimming. Cancun leads by 97 points.97
BrusselsCancun
Score097
Swim season months012
Beaches 10 km023
Coast distance56 km3 km
Water distance3 km
Places to eat. Brussels leads by 27 points.27
BrusselsCancun
Score8154
Restaurants within 2 km of centre1,779681
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km4418
Museums & heritage. Brussels leads by 60 points.60
BrusselsCancun
Score8020
Museums within 10 km1201
Museums within 2 km of centre591
Share of museums within 2 km %49100
Unesco sites within 50 km100
Nightlife. Brussels leads by 32 points.32
BrusselsCancun
Score6836
Drinking venues within 4 km1,414270
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre862175
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %6165
Nightclubs within 4 km8433
Nature & day trips. Cancun leads by 23 points.23
BrusselsCancun
Score3154
Protected land share 50 km %69
Landscape blanket share 50 km %10
Land share of disc %10045
Park area within 2 km65 hectares66 hectares
Good for families. Brussels leads by 24 points.24
BrusselsCancun
Score5632
Tourist attractions within 2 km282
Park area within 2 km65 hectares66 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km23
Sights concentration. Brussels leads by 69 points.69
BrusselsCancun
Score734
Notable places within 2 km2545
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Cancun leads by 16 points.16
BrusselsCancun
Score6076
Price level global76.254.2
Daily budget€180
Year-round weather. Cancun leads by 24 points.24
BrusselsCancun
Score5781
Monthly daytime high6.1 °C to 23.3 °C26.2 °C to 30.3 °C
Monthly rainfall47 mm to 90 mm38 mm to 224 mm
Dry months01
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
Brussels
6
7
11
15
18
21
23
23
20
15
10
6
Cancun
26
27
28
29
30
30
30
30
30
29
27
27
Sea temperature, °C
Brussels
No coastline within reach
Cancun
27
26
26
27
28
28
29
29
29
29
28
27
Rainfall, mm
Brussels
77
67
59
47
61
72
80
90
67
71
75
89
Cancun
63
50
38
41
92
181
89
114
166
224
124
68
Daylight, hours per day
Brussels
9
10
12
14
16
16
16
15
13
11
9
8
Cancun
11
11
12
13
13
13
13
13
12
12
11
11
Sunshine, hours per day
Brussels
2
2
4
6
6
7
7
6
5
4
2
1
Cancun
No sunshine record

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. Brussels: 1991-2020 normals, Uccle (5.2 km from centre). Cancun: 2001-2020 normals, NASA POWER reanalysis grid, no weather station within 90 km.

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromBrusselsCancun
MadridMAD
2 h 15 m
€98-170
BRU · 11 km
10 h 0 m
€721-977
CUN · 14 km
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
7 h 35 m
no fares
BRU · 11 km
3 h 35 m
€328-337
CUN · 14 km
TorontoYYZ, YHM, YTZ
7 h 45 m
no fares
BRU · 11 km
3 h 45 m
€321-392
CUN · 14 km
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
1 h 5 m
€98-165
1 stop
BRU · 11 km
10 h 0 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
BarcelonaBCN
1 h 55 m
€47-116
BRU · 11 km
10 h 35 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
LisbonLIS
2 h 40 m
€120-263
BRU · 11 km
9 h 30 m
€740-984
1 stop
CUN · 14 km
FrankfurtFRA, HHN
1 h 0 m
€138-162
2 stops
BRU · 11 km
10 h 45 m
€657-706
1 stop
CUN · 14 km
MontrealYUL, YHU, YMX
7 h 10 m
€421
BRU · 11 km
4 h 10 m
€361-445
1 stop
CUN · 14 km
DublinDUB
1 h 35 m
no fares
BRU · 11 km
9 h 30 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
ChicagoORD, MDW, DPA, PWK +1
8 h 30 m
no fares
BRU · 11 km
3 h 25 m
€313-363
1 stop
CUN · 14 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

MeasureBrusselsCancun
Official languageFrench, German, DutchSpanish, Nahuatl, Yucatec Maya
CurrencyEuro (EUR)Mexican Peso (MXN)
SocketsCE230 V, 50 HzAB127 V, 60 Hz
Driving sideRightRight
Time zoneUTC+1, UTC+2 in summerUTC-5
Emergency number112911
Elevation70 m5 m
Main airportBrussels Airport (BRU)11 km from centre191 non-stop destinationsCancún International Airport (CUN)14 km from centre136 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year14 days9 days

By the numbers

MeasureBrusselsCancun
City population195,546888,797
People per km²5,908
Museums within 10 km1051
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km100
Distinct cuisines in the centre10931
Swim season, months above 21 °C12 months

Where else could you go?

Every comparison below shares a destination with this one, so you can follow Brussels or Cancun 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. Temperature and rainfall for destinations with no weather station are from the NASA POWER 2001-2020 climatology, derived from MERRA-2. 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.