VacationSelector

Cancun or Granada?

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

Your match

Cancun
50
match

Wins on beaches & swimming and year-round weather with your weighting.

Granada
✓ Best match
53
match

Wins on sights concentration and museums & heritage 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.

CancunGranada
Beaches & swimming. Cancun leads by 97 points.97
CancunGranada
Score970
Swim season months120
Beaches 10 km230
Coast distance3 km48 km
Water distance3 km
Places to eat. Granada leads by 13 points.13
CancunGranada
Score5467
Restaurants within 2 km of centre681872
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km1834
Museums & heritage. Granada leads by 28 points.28
CancunGranada
Score2048
Museums within 10 km128
Museums within 2 km of centre126
Share of museums within 2 km %10093
Unesco sites within 50 km01
Nightlife. Granada leads by 16 points.16
CancunGranada
Score3652
Drinking venues within 4 km270637
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre175494
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %6578
Nightclubs within 4 km3346
Nature & day trips. Granada leads by 9 points.9
CancunGranada
Score5463
Protected land share 50 km %927
Landscape blanket share 50 km %00
Land share of disc %4596
Park area within 2 km66 hectares46 hectares
Good for families. Granada leads by 24 points.24
CancunGranada
Score3256
Tourist attractions within 2 km260
Park area within 2 km66 hectares46 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km30
Sights concentration. Granada leads by 40 points.40
CancunGranada
Score444
Notable places within 2 km550
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Cancun leads by 5 points.5
CancunGranada
Score7671
Price level global54.260.8
Daily budget€122
Year-round weather. Cancun leads by 7 points.7
CancunGranada
Score8174
Monthly daytime high26.2 °C to 30.3 °C13.1 °C to 34.8 °C
Monthly rainfall38 mm to 224 mm0 mm to 51 mm
Dry months17
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
Cancun
26
27
28
29
30
30
30
30
30
29
27
27
Granada
13
15
18
20
25
31
35
34
29
24
17
14
Sea temperature, °C
Cancun
27
26
26
27
28
28
29
29
29
29
28
27
Granada
No coastline within reach
Rainfall, mm
Cancun
63
50
38
41
92
181
89
114
166
224
124
68
Granada
39
33
45
44
29
6
0
3
28
45
51
44
Daylight, hours per day
Cancun
11
11
12
13
13
13
13
13
12
12
11
11
Granada
10
11
12
13
14
15
14
14
13
11
10
10
Sunshine, hours per day
Cancun
No sunshine record
Granada
6
6
7
8
10
12
13
11
8
7
5
5

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. Cancun: 2001-2020 normals, NASA POWER reanalysis grid, no weather station within 90 km. Granada: 1991-2020 normals, Granada / Caserío Hospicio (5 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromCancunGranada
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
10 h 0 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
2 h 40 m
€67-129
AGP · 97 km
AmsterdamAMS
10 h 25 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
2 h 55 m
€146-177
AGP · 97 km
DublinDUB
9 h 30 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
2 h 50 m
€122-139
1 stop
AGP · 97 km
ManchesterMAN
9 h 50 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
2 h 50 m
no fares
AGP · 97 km
StockholmARN, BMA, NYO, VST
11 h 0 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
4 h 15 m
€112-120
AGP · 97 km
MontrealYUL, YHU, YMX
4 h 10 m
€361-445
1 stop
CUN · 14 km
7 h 25 m
no fares
AGP · 97 km
MadridMAD
10 h 0 m
€721-977
CUN · 14 km
1 h 5 m
no fares
GRX · 16 km
FrankfurtFRA, HHN
10 h 45 m
€657-706
1 stop
CUN · 14 km
2 h 50 m
€124-199
1 stop
AGP · 97 km
MilanMXP, BGY, LIN
11 h 0 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
2 h 25 m
€61-88
AGP · 97 km
BarcelonaBCN
10 h 35 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
1 h 30 m
€92-138
GRX · 16 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

MeasureCancunGranada
Official languageSpanish, Nahuatl, Yucatec MayaSpanish
CurrencyMexican Peso (MXN)Euro (EUR)
SocketsAB127 V, 60 HzCF230 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideRightRight
Time zoneUTC-5UTC+1, UTC+2 in summer
Emergency number911112
Elevation5 m693 m
Main airportCancún International Airport (CUN)14 km from centre136 non-stop destinationsF.G.L. Airport Granada-Jaén Airport (GRX)16 km from centre12 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year9 days12 days

By the numbers

MeasureCancunGranada
City population888,797233,975
People per km²2,659
Museums within 10 km119
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km01
Distinct cuisines in the centre3162
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 Cancun or Granada 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). 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. 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. Weather data by Meteostat. Meteorological data provided by NOAA, DWD and others. Tourism statistics from Eurostat, © European Union, reused under CC BY 4.0. 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.