VacationSelector

Cancun or Portland?

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

Your match

Cancun
✓ Best match
50
match

Wins on beaches & swimming and value for money with your weighting.

Portland
42
match

Wins on sights concentration and nightlife 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.

CancunPortland
Beaches & swimming. Cancun leads by 97 points.97
CancunPortland
Score970
Swim season months120
Beaches 10 km2327
Coast distance3 km69 km
Water distance3 km
Places to eat. Portland leads by 20 points.20
CancunPortland
Score5474
Restaurants within 2 km of centre6811,011
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km1844
Museums & heritage. Portland leads by 15 points.15
CancunPortland
Score2035
Museums within 10 km123
Museums within 2 km of centre115
Share of museums within 2 km %10065
Unesco sites within 50 km00
Nightlife. Portland leads by 22 points.22
CancunPortland
Score3658
Drinking venues within 4 km270942
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre175518
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %6555
Nightclubs within 4 km3332
Nature & day trips. Cancun leads by 19 points.19
CancunPortland
Score5435
Protected land share 50 km %913
Landscape blanket share 50 km %03
Land share of disc %45100
Park area within 2 km66 hectares37 hectares
Good for families. Portland leads by 2 points.2
CancunPortland
Score3234
Tourist attractions within 2 km28
Park area within 2 km66 hectares37 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km32
Sights concentration. Portland leads by 31 points.31
CancunPortland
Score435
Notable places within 2 km529
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Cancun leads by 33 points.33
CancunPortland
Score7643
Price level global54.2100
Daily budget
Year-round weather. Cancun leads by 16 points.16
CancunPortland
Score8165
Monthly daytime high26.2 °C to 30.3 °C7.9 °C to 27.7 °C
Monthly rainfall38 mm to 224 mm13 mm to 145 mm
Dry months13
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
Portland
8
11
13
16
20
23
27
28
25
18
12
8
Sea temperature, °C
Cancun
27
26
26
27
28
28
29
29
29
29
28
27
Portland
No coastline within reach
Rainfall, mm
Cancun
63
50
38
41
92
181
89
114
166
224
124
68
Portland
128
94
101
75
65
41
13
14
39
87
138
145
Daylight, hours per day
Cancun
11
11
12
13
13
13
13
13
12
12
11
11
Portland
9
10
12
14
15
16
15
14
13
11
10
9

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. Portland: 1991-2020 normals, Portland International Airport (9.8 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromCancunPortland
Los AngelesLAX, BUR, SNA, VNY
4 h 40 m
€319-382
1 stop
CUN · 14 km
2 h 15 m
no fares
PDX · 10 km
ChicagoORD, MDW, DPA, PWK +1
3 h 25 m
€313-363
1 stop
CUN · 14 km
3 h 55 m
no fares
PDX · 10 km
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
3 h 35 m
€328-337
CUN · 14 km
5 h 20 m
no fares
PDX · 10 km
DenverDEN, APA
3 h 50 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
2 h 30 m
€167-182
PDX · 10 km
DallasDFW, DAL, AFW
2 h 35 m
€292-400
1 stop
CUN · 14 km
3 h 45 m
no fares
PDX · 10 km
PhoenixPHX, AZA
4 h 0 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
2 h 35 m
no fares
PDX · 10 km
Kansas CityMCI, MKC
3 h 15 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
3 h 30 m
no fares
PDX · 10 km
San FranciscoSFO
5 h 15 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
1 h 45 m
no fares
PDX · 10 km
FrankfurtFRA, HHN
10 h 45 m
€657-706
1 stop
CUN · 14 km
10 h 30 m
no fares
PDX · 10 km
GuadalajaraGDL
2 h 40 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
4 h 35 m
no fares
PDX · 10 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

MeasureCancunPortland
Official languageSpanish, Nahuatl, Yucatec Maya
CurrencyMexican Peso (MXN)US Dollar (USD)
SocketsAB127 V, 60 HzAB120 V, 60 Hz
Driving sideRightRight
Time zoneUTC-5UTC-8, UTC-7 in summer
Emergency number911911
Elevation5 m152 m
Main airportCancún International Airport (CUN)14 km from centre136 non-stop destinationsPortland International Airport (PDX)10 km from centre87 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year9 days12 days

By the numbers

MeasureCancunPortland
City population888,797652,503
People per km²1,736
Museums within 10 km117
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km00
Distinct cuisines in the centre3182
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 Portland 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.