VacationSelector

Cancun or Malaga?

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.

Malaga
✓ Best match
59
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.

CancunMalaga
Beaches & swimming. Cancun leads by 31 points.31
CancunMalaga
Score9766
Swim season months123
Beaches 10 km2321
Coast distance3 km0 km
Water distance3 km0 km
Places to eat. Malaga leads by 15 points.15
CancunMalaga
Score5469
Restaurants within 2 km of centre6811,002
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km1834
Museums & heritage. Malaga leads by 33 points.33
CancunMalaga
Score2053
Museums within 10 km140
Museums within 2 km of centre135
Share of museums within 2 km %10088
Unesco sites within 50 km01
Nightlife. Malaga leads by 18 points.18
CancunMalaga
Score3654
Drinking venues within 4 km270715
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre175486
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %6568
Nightclubs within 4 km3345
Nature & day trips. Cancun leads by 11 points.11
CancunMalaga
Score5443
Protected land share 50 km %97
Landscape blanket share 50 km %00
Land share of disc %4563
Park area within 2 km66 hectares85 hectares
Good for families. Malaga leads by 21 points.21
CancunMalaga
Score3253
Tourist attractions within 2 km233
Park area within 2 km66 hectares85 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km30
Sights concentration. Malaga leads by 33 points.33
CancunMalaga
Score437
Notable places within 2 km533
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Cancun leads by 5 points.5
CancunMalaga
Score7671
Price level global54.260.8
Daily budget€122
Year-round weather. Malaga leads by 1 points.1
CancunMalaga
Score8182
Monthly daytime high26.2 °C to 30.3 °C17.2 °C to 31.5 °C
Monthly rainfall38 mm to 224 mm0 mm to 88 mm
Dry months15
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
Malaga
17
18
20
22
25
29
31
32
28
24
20
18
Sea temperature, °C
Cancun
27
26
26
27
28
28
29
29
29
29
28
27
Malaga
15
15
15
16
18
20
22
23
22
20
17
16
Rainfall, mm
Cancun
63
50
38
41
92
181
89
114
166
224
124
68
Malaga
62
55
66
41
23
4
0
3
25
60
78
88
Daylight, hours per day
Cancun
11
11
12
13
13
13
13
13
12
12
11
11
Malaga
10
11
12
13
14
15
14
14
13
11
10
10
Sunshine, hours per day
Cancun
No sunshine record
Malaga
6
6
7
8
10
11
12
11
8
7
6
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. Malaga: 1991-2020 normals, Malaga / Aeropuerto (8.2 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromCancunMalaga
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
10 h 0 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
2 h 40 m
€67-129
AGP · 9 km
AmsterdamAMS
10 h 25 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
2 h 55 m
€146-177
AGP · 9 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
10 h 20 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
2 h 25 m
€92
AGP · 9 km
DublinDUB
9 h 30 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
2 h 50 m
€122-139
1 stop
AGP · 9 km
MadridMAD
10 h 0 m
€721-977
CUN · 14 km
1 h 10 m
no fares
AGP · 9 km
BarcelonaBCN
10 h 35 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
1 h 35 m
€73-109
AGP · 9 km
MontrealYUL, YHU, YMX
4 h 10 m
€361-445
1 stop
CUN · 14 km
7 h 25 m
no fares
AGP · 9 km
ManchesterMAN
9 h 50 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
2 h 50 m
no fares
AGP · 9 km
StockholmARN, BMA, NYO, VST
11 h 0 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
4 h 15 m
€112-120
AGP · 9 km
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
3 h 35 m
€328-337
CUN · 14 km
7 h 35 m
no fares
AGP · 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

MeasureCancunMalaga
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 m18 m
Main airportCancún International Airport (CUN)14 km from centre136 non-stop destinationsMálaga-Costa del Sol Airport (AGP)9 km from centre165 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year9 days12 days

By the numbers

MeasureCancunMalaga
City population888,797599,063
People per km²1,517
Museums within 10 km132
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km01
Distinct cuisines in the centre3165
Swim season, months above 21 °C12 months3 months

Where else could you go?

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