VacationSelector

Buenos Aires or Mexico City?

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

Buenos Aires
63
match

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

Mexico City
62
match

Wins on nature & day trips 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.

Buenos AiresMexico City
Beaches & swimming. Buenos Aires leads by 33 points.33
Buenos AiresMexico City
Score330
Swim season months40
Beaches 10 km04
Coast distance2 km247 km
Water distance2 km
Places to eat. Buenos Aires leads by 1 points.1
Buenos AiresMexico City
Score6766
Restaurants within 2 km of centre1,1972,179
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km2615
Museums & heritage. Mexico City leads by 13 points.13
Buenos AiresMexico City
Score6679
Museums within 10 km148138
Museums within 2 km of centre7165
Share of museums within 2 km %4847
Unesco sites within 50 km16
Nightlife. Mexico City leads by 10 points.10
Buenos AiresMexico City
Score6878
Drinking venues within 4 km1,2952,156
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre777926
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %6043
Nightclubs within 4 km160198
Nature & day trips. Mexico City leads by 20 points.20
Buenos AiresMexico City
Score4363
Protected land share 50 km %930
Landscape blanket share 50 km %10
Land share of disc %67100
Park area within 2 km69 hectares32 hectares
Good for families. Buenos Aires leads by 19 points.19
Buenos AiresMexico City
Score6950
Tourist attractions within 2 km4923
Park area within 2 km69 hectares32 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km64
Sights concentration. Buenos Aires leads by 6 points.6
Buenos AiresMexico City
Score6054
Notable places within 2 km12588
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Buenos Aires leads by 6 points.6
Buenos AiresMexico City
Score8276
Price level global45.854.2
Daily budget
Year-round weather. Mexico City leads by 15 points.15
Buenos AiresMexico City
Score7590
Monthly daytime high14.7 °C to 28.5 °C22.2 °C to 27.9 °C
Monthly rainfall50 mm to 135 mm3 mm to 186 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
Buenos Aires
29
27
26
22
19
16
15
17
18
22
24
28
Mexico City
22
25
26
28
27
26
25
25
24
23
23
22
Sea temperature, °C
Buenos Aires
25
25
23
21
17
14
13
13
15
18
21
23
Mexico City
No coastline within reach
Rainfall, mm
Buenos Aires
135
94
123
122
85
54
50
52
58
98
87
107
Mexico City
7
3
19
27
53
127
176
186
144
79
10
9
Daylight, hours per day
Buenos Aires
14
13
12
11
10
10
10
11
12
13
14
14
Mexico City
11
12
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
Mexico City
8
8
9
8
8
6
6
6
5
6
7
7

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). Mexico City: 1991-2020 normals, Mexico Central, D. F. (7.9 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromBuenos AiresMexico City
LimaLIM
4 h 25 m
no fares
EZE · 28 km
5 h 40 m
€380-474
1 stop
MEX · 7 km
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
10 h 40 m
no fares
EZE · 28 km
4 h 40 m
€335-379
MEX · 7 km
Sao PauloGRU, VCP, CGH, RTE
2 h 40 m
€283-314
EZE · 28 km
9 h 25 m
no fares
MEX · 7 km
SantiagoSCL
2 h 0 m
€156-221
EZE · 28 km
8 h 25 m
no fares
MEX · 7 km
CancunCUN
8 h 45 m
no fares
EZE · 28 km
2 h 10 m
€123-162
MEX · 7 km
MiamiMIA, OPF
9 h 5 m
no fares
EZE · 28 km
3 h 5 m
no fares
MEX · 7 km
BogotaBOG
6 h 10 m
no fares
EZE · 28 km
4 h 25 m
no fares
MEX · 7 km
MadridMAD
12 h 30 m
€961-982
EZE · 28 km
11 h 20 m
no fares
MEX · 7 km
TorontoYYZ, YHM, YTZ
11 h 15 m
no fares
EZE · 28 km
4 h 30 m
€367-420
1 stop
MEX · 7 km
DubaiDXB, DWC
16 h 45 m
€1,481-1680
EZE · 28 km
17 h 30 m
€1,075-1211
2 stops
MEX · 7 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

MeasureBuenos AiresMexico City
Official languageSpanishSpanish, Nahuatl, Yucatec Maya
CurrencyArgentine Peso (ARS)Mexican Peso (MXN)
SocketsCI220 V, 50 HzAB127 V, 60 Hz
Driving sideLeftRight
Time zoneUTC-3UTC-6
Emergency number117 or 911911
Elevation25 m2,240 m
Main airportEzeiza International Airport - Ministro Pistarini (EZE)28 km from centre53 non-stop destinationsMexico City Benito Juárez International Airport (MEX)7 km from centre95 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year16 days9 days

By the numbers

MeasureBuenos AiresMexico City
City population3,121,7079,209,944
People per km²15,3556,202
Museums within 10 km75108
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km16
Distinct cuisines in the centre5550
Swim season, months above 21 °C4 months

Where else could you go?

Every comparison below shares a destination with this one, so you can follow Buenos Aires or Mexico City 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. 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.