VacationSelector

Cancun or Lima?

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 nature & day trips with your weighting.

Lima
✓ Best match
55
match

Wins on museums & heritage and sights concentration 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.

CancunLima
Beaches & swimming. Cancun leads by 60 points.60
CancunLima
Score9737
Swim season months122
Beaches 10 km2312
Coast distance3 km6 km
Water distance3 km6 km
Places to eat. Cancun leads by 2 points.2
CancunLima
Score5452
Restaurants within 2 km of centre681796
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km1814
Museums & heritage. Lima leads by 44 points.44
CancunLima
Score2064
Museums within 10 km189
Museums within 2 km of centre147
Share of museums within 2 km %10053
Unesco sites within 50 km02
Nightlife. Lima leads by 9 points.9
CancunLima
Score3645
Drinking venues within 4 km270409
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre175177
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %6543
Nightclubs within 4 km3363
Nature & day trips. Cancun leads by 27 points.27
CancunLima
Score5427
Protected land share 50 km %92
Landscape blanket share 50 km %00
Land share of disc %4551
Park area within 2 km66 hectares54 hectares
Good for families. Lima leads by 24 points.24
CancunLima
Score3256
Tourist attractions within 2 km225
Park area within 2 km66 hectares54 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km34
Sights concentration. Lima leads by 42 points.42
CancunLima
Score446
Notable places within 2 km554
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Lima leads by 4 points.4
CancunLima
Score7680
Price level global54.247.7
Daily budget
Year-round weather. Lima leads by 11 points.11
CancunLima
Score8192
Monthly daytime high26.2 °C to 30.3 °C18.6 °C to 27.4 °C
Monthly rainfall38 mm to 224 mm0 mm to 1 mm
Dry months112
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
Lima
26
27
27
25
22
20
19
19
19
20
22
24
Sea temperature, °C
Cancun
27
26
26
27
28
28
29
29
29
29
28
27
Lima
21
22
21
20
19
18
18
17
17
17
18
19
Rainfall, mm
Cancun
63
50
38
41
92
181
89
114
166
224
124
68
Lima
1
1
0
0
1
1
1
1
1
1
0
1
Daylight, hours per day
Cancun
11
11
12
13
13
13
13
13
12
12
11
11
Lima
13
13
12
12
12
11
12
12
12
12
13
13
Sunshine, hours per day
Cancun
No sunshine record
Lima
5
5
6
6
3
1
1
1
1
2
3
4

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. Lima: 1991-2020 normals, Lima-Callao / Aerop. Internacional Jorgechavez (10.9 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromCancunLima
Mexico CityMEX, NLU, TLC
2 h 10 m
€110-128
CUN · 14 km
5 h 40 m
€348-370
1 stop
LIM · 9 km
TorontoYYZ, YHM, YTZ
3 h 45 m
€321-392
CUN · 14 km
8 h 0 m
no fares
LIM · 9 km
SantiagoSCL
8 h 5 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
3 h 35 m
€181-198
LIM · 9 km
MadridMAD
10 h 0 m
€721-977
CUN · 14 km
11 h 50 m
€895-903
LIM · 9 km
BogotaBOG
3 h 20 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
2 h 55 m
no fares
LIM · 9 km
MiamiMIA, OPF
1 h 40 m
€327-383
1 stop
CUN · 14 km
5 h 40 m
€403-426
1 stop
LIM · 9 km
MontrealYUL, YHU, YMX
4 h 10 m
€361-445
1 stop
CUN · 14 km
8 h 10 m
no fares
LIM · 9 km
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
3 h 35 m
€328-337
CUN · 14 km
7 h 35 m
no fares
LIM · 9 km
Los AngelesLAX, BUR, SNA, VNY
4 h 40 m
€319-382
1 stop
CUN · 14 km
8 h 35 m
no fares
LIM · 9 km
AtlantaATL, PDK
2 h 20 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
6 h 45 m
no fares
LIM · 9 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

MeasureCancunLima
Official languageSpanish, Nahuatl, Yucatec MayaSpanish, Aymara, Quechua
CurrencyMexican Peso (MXN)Sol (PEN)
SocketsAB127 V, 60 HzABC220 V, 60 Hz
Driving sideRightRight
Time zoneUTC-5UTC-5
Emergency number911111 or 911
Elevation5 m154 m
Main airportCancún International Airport (CUN)14 km from centre136 non-stop destinationsJorge Chávez International Airport (LIM)9 km from centre63 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year9 days14 days

By the numbers

MeasureCancunLima
City population888,7979,943,800
People per km²3,721
Museums within 10 km146
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km02
Distinct cuisines in the centre3133
Swim season, months above 21 °C12 months2 months

Where else could you go?

Every comparison below shares a destination with this one, so you can follow Cancun or Lima 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. 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.