VacationSelector

Cancun or Madrid?

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.

Madrid
✓ Best match
66
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.

CancunMadrid
Beaches & swimming. Cancun leads by 97 points.97
CancunMadrid
Score970
Swim season months120
Beaches 10 km234
Coast distance3 km305 km
Water distance3 km
Places to eat. Madrid leads by 29 points.29
CancunMadrid
Score5483
Restaurants within 2 km of centre6813,508
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km1828
Museums & heritage. Madrid leads by 55 points.55
CancunMadrid
Score2075
Museums within 10 km197
Museums within 2 km of centre159
Share of museums within 2 km %10061
Unesco sites within 50 km04
Nightlife. Madrid leads by 45 points.45
CancunMadrid
Score3681
Drinking venues within 4 km2702,414
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre1751,498
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %6562
Nightclubs within 4 km33341
Nature & day trips. Madrid leads by 9 points.9
CancunMadrid
Score5463
Protected land share 50 km %919
Landscape blanket share 50 km %00
Land share of disc %45100
Park area within 2 km66 hectares187 hectares
Good for families. Madrid leads by 45 points.45
CancunMadrid
Score3277
Tourist attractions within 2 km261
Park area within 2 km66 hectares187 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km33
Sights concentration. Madrid leads by 71 points.71
CancunMadrid
Score475
Notable places within 2 km5288
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Cancun leads by 5 points.5
CancunMadrid
Score7671
Price level global54.260.8
Daily budget€122
Year-round weather. Cancun leads by 9 points.9
CancunMadrid
Score8172
Monthly daytime high26.2 °C to 30.3 °C10 °C to 32.7 °C
Monthly rainfall38 mm to 224 mm9 mm to 64 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
Madrid
10
12
16
19
23
29
33
32
27
20
14
10
Sea temperature, °C
Cancun
27
26
26
27
28
28
29
29
29
29
28
27
Madrid
No coastline within reach
Rainfall, mm
Cancun
63
50
38
41
92
181
89
114
166
224
124
68
Madrid
32
34
35
46
49
20
9
10
24
64
53
42
Daylight, hours per day
Cancun
11
11
12
13
13
13
13
13
12
12
11
11
Madrid
10
11
12
13
14
15
15
14
13
11
10
9
Sunshine, hours per day
Cancun
No sunshine record
Madrid
5
5
7
8
9
11
12
11
9
6
5
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. Madrid: 1991-2020 normals, Madrid (1.7 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromCancunMadrid
Mexico CityMEX, NLU, TLC
2 h 10 m
€110-128
CUN · 14 km
11 h 20 m
€861-905
1 stop
MAD · 14 km
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
10 h 0 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
2 h 10 m
€52-105
MAD · 14 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
10 h 20 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
1 h 55 m
€95-123
MAD · 14 km
TorontoYYZ, YHM, YTZ
3 h 45 m
€321-392
CUN · 14 km
7 h 50 m
no fares
MAD · 14 km
BogotaBOG
3 h 20 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
10 h 5 m
€963-1395
2 stops
MAD · 14 km
LisbonLIS
9 h 30 m
€740-984
1 stop
CUN · 14 km
1 h 15 m
€40-87
MAD · 14 km
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
3 h 35 m
€328-337
CUN · 14 km
7 h 25 m
€496-659
1 stop
MAD · 14 km
BarcelonaBCN
10 h 35 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
1 h 15 m
€116-130
1 stop
MAD · 14 km
RomeFCO, CIA
11 h 30 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
2 h 15 m
€83-91
MAD · 14 km
AmsterdamAMS
10 h 25 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
2 h 25 m
€175-213
MAD · 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

MeasureCancunMadrid
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 m663 m
Main airportCancún International Airport (CUN)14 km from centre136 non-stop destinationsAdolfo Suárez Madrid–Barajas Airport (MAD)14 km from centre236 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year9 days12 days

By the numbers

MeasureCancunMadrid
City population888,7973,506,730
People per km²5,801
Museums within 10 km188
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km04
Distinct cuisines in the centre31106
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 Madrid 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.