VacationSelector

Buenos Aires or Cancun?

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

Your match

Buenos Aires
✓ Best match
63
match

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

Cancun
50
match

Wins on beaches & swimming and nature & day trips 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.

Buenos AiresCancun
Beaches & swimming. Cancun leads by 64 points.64
Buenos AiresCancun
Score3397
Swim season months412
Beaches 10 km023
Coast distance2 km3 km
Water distance2 km3 km
Places to eat. Buenos Aires leads by 13 points.13
Buenos AiresCancun
Score6754
Restaurants within 2 km of centre1,197681
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km2618
Museums & heritage. Buenos Aires leads by 46 points.46
Buenos AiresCancun
Score6620
Museums within 10 km1481
Museums within 2 km of centre711
Share of museums within 2 km %48100
Unesco sites within 50 km10
Nightlife. Buenos Aires leads by 32 points.32
Buenos AiresCancun
Score6836
Drinking venues within 4 km1,295270
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre777175
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %6065
Nightclubs within 4 km16033
Nature & day trips. Cancun leads by 11 points.11
Buenos AiresCancun
Score4354
Protected land share 50 km %99
Landscape blanket share 50 km %10
Land share of disc %6745
Park area within 2 km69 hectares66 hectares
Good for families. Buenos Aires leads by 37 points.37
Buenos AiresCancun
Score6932
Tourist attractions within 2 km492
Park area within 2 km69 hectares66 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km63
Sights concentration. Buenos Aires leads by 56 points.56
Buenos AiresCancun
Score604
Notable places within 2 km1255
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Buenos Aires leads by 6 points.6
Buenos AiresCancun
Score8276
Price level global45.854.2
Daily budget
Year-round weather. Cancun leads by 6 points.6
Buenos AiresCancun
Score7581
Monthly daytime high14.7 °C to 28.5 °C26.2 °C to 30.3 °C
Monthly rainfall50 mm to 135 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
Buenos Aires
29
27
26
22
19
16
15
17
18
22
24
28
Cancun
26
27
28
29
30
30
30
30
30
29
27
27
Sea temperature, °C
Buenos Aires
25
25
23
21
17
14
13
13
15
18
21
23
Cancun
27
26
26
27
28
28
29
29
29
29
28
27
Rainfall, mm
Buenos Aires
135
94
123
122
85
54
50
52
58
98
87
107
Cancun
63
50
38
41
92
181
89
114
166
224
124
68
Daylight, hours per day
Buenos Aires
14
13
12
11
10
10
10
11
12
13
14
14
Cancun
11
11
12
13
13
13
13
13
12
12
11
11
Sunshine, hours per day
Buenos Aires
10
8
8
6
6
4
5
6
6
7
8
9
Cancun
No sunshine record

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. Buenos Aires: 1991-2020 normals, Aeroparque Bs. As. Aerodrome (4.9 km from centre). Cancun: 2001-2020 normals, NASA POWER reanalysis grid, no weather station within 90 km.

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromBuenos AiresCancun
TorontoYYZ, YHM, YTZ
11 h 15 m
no fares
EZE · 28 km
3 h 45 m
€321-392
CUN · 14 km
Mexico CityMEX, NLU, TLC
9 h 20 m
no fares
EZE · 28 km
2 h 10 m
€110-128
CUN · 14 km
MadridMAD
12 h 30 m
€961-982
EZE · 28 km
10 h 0 m
€721-977
CUN · 14 km
MiamiMIA, OPF
9 h 5 m
no fares
EZE · 28 km
1 h 40 m
€327-383
1 stop
CUN · 14 km
SantiagoSCL
2 h 0 m
€156-221
EZE · 28 km
8 h 5 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
10 h 40 m
no fares
EZE · 28 km
3 h 35 m
€328-337
CUN · 14 km
BogotaBOG
6 h 10 m
no fares
EZE · 28 km
3 h 20 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
LimaLIM
4 h 25 m
no fares
EZE · 28 km
5 h 10 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
13 h 45 m
€1,147-1238
2 stops
EZE · 28 km
10 h 0 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
FrankfurtFRA, HHN
14 h 10 m
€1,193-1373
3 stops
EZE · 28 km
10 h 45 m
€657-706
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 2026-09 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

MeasureBuenos AiresCancun
Official languageSpanishSpanish, Nahuatl, Yucatec Maya
CurrencyArgentine Peso (ARS)Mexican Peso (MXN)
SocketsCI220 V, 50 HzAB127 V, 60 Hz
Driving sideLeftRight
Time zoneUTC-3UTC-5
Emergency number117 or 911911
Elevation25 m5 m
Main airportEzeiza International Airport - Ministro Pistarini (EZE)28 km from centre53 non-stop destinationsCancún International Airport (CUN)14 km from centre136 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year16 days9 days

By the numbers

MeasureBuenos AiresCancun
City population3,121,707888,797
People per km²15,355
Museums within 10 km751
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km10
Distinct cuisines in the centre5531
Swim season, months above 21 °C4 months12 months

Where else could you go?

Every comparison below shares a destination with this one, so you can follow Buenos Aires 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. Sea surface temperature from NOAA OISST v2.1, NOAA Physical Sciences Laboratory. Airport data from OurAirports (public domain). 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. 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.