VacationSelector

Cancun or Santiago de Compostela?

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 year-round weather with your weighting.

Santiago de Compostela
42
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.

CancunSantiago de Compostela
Beaches & swimming. Cancun leads by 97 points.97
CancunSantiago de Compostela
Score970
Swim season months120
Beaches 10 km230
Coast distance3 km26 km
Water distance3 km26 km
Places to eat. Cancun leads by 6 points.6
CancunSantiago de Compostela
Score5448
Restaurants within 2 km of centre681336
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km1823
Museums & heritage. Santiago de Compostela leads by 24 points.24
CancunSantiago de Compostela
Score2044
Museums within 10 km116
Museums within 2 km of centre114
Share of museums within 2 km %10088
Unesco sites within 50 km02
Nightlife. Cancun and Santiago de Compostela are level on 36.
CancunSantiago de Compostela
Score3636
Drinking venues within 4 km270306
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre175268
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %6588
Nightclubs within 4 km3313
Nature & day trips. Cancun leads by 8 points.8
CancunSantiago de Compostela
Score5446
Protected land share 50 km %911
Landscape blanket share 50 km %00
Land share of disc %4592
Park area within 2 km66 hectares109 hectares
Good for families. Cancun leads by 5 points.5
CancunSantiago de Compostela
Score3227
Tourist attractions within 2 km22
Park area within 2 km66 hectares109 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km30
Sights concentration. Santiago de Compostela leads by 38 points.38
CancunSantiago de Compostela
Score442
Notable places within 2 km544
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Cancun leads by 5 points.5
CancunSantiago de Compostela
Score7671
Price level global54.260.8
Daily budget€122
Year-round weather. Cancun leads by 19 points.19
CancunSantiago de Compostela
Score8162
Monthly daytime high26.2 °C to 30.3 °C11.3 °C to 25 °C
Monthly rainfall38 mm to 224 mm41 mm to 223 mm
Dry months10
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
Santiago de Compostela
11
13
15
17
20
23
25
25
23
19
14
12
Sea temperature, °C
Cancun
27
26
26
27
28
28
29
29
29
29
28
27
Santiago de Compostela
14
13
13
14
15
16
17
17
17
16
15
14
Rainfall, mm
Cancun
63
50
38
41
92
181
89
114
166
224
124
68
Santiago de Compostela
217
149
153
136
116
61
41
61
91
208
223
222
Daylight, hours per day
Cancun
11
11
12
13
13
13
13
13
12
12
11
11
Santiago de Compostela
9
11
12
13
15
15
15
14
13
11
10
9
Sunshine, hours per day
Cancun
No sunshine record
Santiago de Compostela
3
4
5
6
7
7
8
8
6
4
3
3

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. Santiago de Compostela: 1991-2020 normals, Santiago / Labacolla (8.4 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromCancunSantiago de Compostela
MadridMAD
10 h 0 m
€721-977
CUN · 14 km
1 h 15 m
€86-122
SCQ · 10 km
BarcelonaBCN
10 h 35 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
1 h 40 m
€71-184
SCQ · 10 km
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
10 h 0 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
2 h 0 m
no fares
SCQ · 10 km
DublinDUB
9 h 30 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
2 h 5 m
no fares
SCQ · 10 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
10 h 20 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
1 h 55 m
no fares
SCQ · 10 km
AmsterdamAMS
10 h 25 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
2 h 20 m
no fares
SCQ · 10 km
FrankfurtFRA, HHN
10 h 45 m
€657-706
1 stop
CUN · 14 km
2 h 25 m
no fares
SCQ · 10 km
MilanMXP, BGY, LIN
11 h 0 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
2 h 20 m
no fares
SCQ · 10 km
ZurichZRH
10 h 55 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
2 h 20 m
no fares
SCQ · 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

MeasureCancunSantiago de Compostela
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 m260 m
Main airportCancún International Airport (CUN)14 km from centre136 non-stop destinationsSantiago-Rosalía de Castro Airport (SCQ)10 km from centre27 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year9 days13 days

By the numbers

MeasureCancunSantiago de Compostela
City population888,797100,965
People per km²459
Museums within 10 km16
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km02
Distinct cuisines in the centre3138
Swim season, months above 21 °C12 monthsNone

Where else could you go?

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