VacationSelector

Cancun or Valencia?

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 value for money with your weighting.

Valencia
✓ Best match
64
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.

CancunValencia
Beaches & swimming. Cancun leads by 30 points.30
CancunValencia
Score9767
Swim season months125
Beaches 10 km2312
Coast distance3 km3 km
Water distance3 km3 km
Places to eat. Valencia leads by 24 points.24
CancunValencia
Score5478
Restaurants within 2 km of centre6811,995
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km1833
Museums & heritage. Valencia leads by 35 points.35
CancunValencia
Score2055
Museums within 10 km159
Museums within 2 km of centre126
Share of museums within 2 km %10044
Unesco sites within 50 km02
Nightlife. Valencia leads by 34 points.34
CancunValencia
Score3670
Drinking venues within 4 km2701,513
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre175957
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %6563
Nightclubs within 4 km33108
Nature & day trips. Cancun leads by 1 points.1
CancunValencia
Score5453
Protected land share 50 km %910
Landscape blanket share 50 km %00
Land share of disc %4564
Park area within 2 km66 hectares119 hectares
Good for families. Valencia leads by 10 points.10
CancunValencia
Score3242
Tourist attractions within 2 km212
Park area within 2 km66 hectares119 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km30
Sights concentration. Valencia leads by 48 points.48
CancunValencia
Score452
Notable places within 2 km578
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Cancun leads by 5 points.5
CancunValencia
Score7671
Price level global54.260.8
Daily budget€122
Year-round weather. Valencia leads by 3 points.3
CancunValencia
Score8184
Monthly daytime high26.2 °C to 30.3 °C16.8 °C to 30.6 °C
Monthly rainfall38 mm to 224 mm7 mm to 70 mm
Dry months18
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
Valencia
17
17
19
21
24
28
30
31
28
25
20
17
Sea temperature, °C
Cancun
27
26
26
27
28
28
29
29
29
29
28
27
Valencia
14
14
14
16
18
22
25
26
25
22
19
16
Rainfall, mm
Cancun
63
50
38
41
92
181
89
114
166
224
124
68
Valencia
38
30
40
33
36
26
7
15
70
66
52
48
Daylight, hours per day
Cancun
11
11
12
13
13
13
13
13
12
12
11
11
Valencia
10
11
12
13
14
15
15
14
13
11
10
9
Sunshine, hours per day
Cancun
No sunshine record
Valencia
6
6
7
8
9
9
10
10
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. Valencia: 1991-2020 normals, Valencia (1.6 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromCancunValencia
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
10 h 0 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
2 h 15 m
€80-167
VLC · 9 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
10 h 20 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
1 h 55 m
€103-131
VLC · 9 km
AmsterdamAMS
10 h 25 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
2 h 25 m
€155-178
VLC · 9 km
MadridMAD
10 h 0 m
€721-977
CUN · 14 km
1 h 0 m
€69-81
VLC · 9 km
RomeFCO, CIA
11 h 30 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
2 h 0 m
€70-117
VLC · 9 km
MilanMXP, BGY, LIN
11 h 0 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
1 h 50 m
€51-87
VLC · 9 km
FrankfurtFRA, HHN
10 h 45 m
€657-706
1 stop
CUN · 14 km
2 h 15 m
€128-199
1 stop
VLC · 9 km
LisbonLIS
9 h 30 m
€740-984
1 stop
CUN · 14 km
1 h 35 m
€56-140
VLC · 9 km
MontrealYUL, YHU, YMX
4 h 10 m
€361-445
1 stop
CUN · 14 km
7 h 30 m
no fares
VLC · 9 km
ZurichZRH
10 h 55 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
2 h 0 m
€151-206
1 stop
VLC · 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

MeasureCancunValencia
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 m15 m
Main airportCancún International Airport (CUN)14 km from centre136 non-stop destinationsValencia Airport (VLC)9 km from centre107 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year9 days13 days

By the numbers

MeasureCancunValencia
City population888,797840,792
People per km²6,242
Museums within 10 km146
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km02
Distinct cuisines in the centre3192
Swim season, months above 21 °C12 months5 months

Where else could you go?

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