VacationSelector

Cannes or Lyon?

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

Your match

Cannes
49
match

Wins on beaches & swimming and year-round weather with your weighting.

Lyon
✓ Best match
52
match

Wins on good for families 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.

The verdict

Choose Cannes if the sea is the point of the trip: 68 beaches within reach and four months warm enough to swim, in the drier summer of the two.

Choose Lyon if the trip happens in the city rather than on the coast: far more places to eat and drink, roughly twice the museums, and more to occupy children who want parks and attractions rather than sand.

Scoreboard

Each measure scored 0 to 100. Open a row for the figures behind the score.

CannesLyon
Beaches & swimming. Cannes leads by 73 points.73
CannesLyon
Score730
Swim season months40
Beaches 10 km6826
Coast distance1 km253 km
Water distance1 km—
Places to eat. Lyon leads by 29 points.29
CannesLyon
Score5079
Restaurants within 2 km of centre4731,691
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km1940
Museums & heritage. Lyon leads by 19 points.19
CannesLyon
Score3655
Museums within 10 km3153
Museums within 2 km of centre525
Share of museums within 2 km %1647
Unesco sites within 50 km22
Nightlife. Lyon leads by 30 points.30
CannesLyon
Score2858
Drinking venues within 4 km188866
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre164611
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %8771
Nightclubs within 4 km1947
Nature & day trips. Cannes and Lyon are level on 33.
CannesLyon
Score3333
Protected land share 50 km %176
Landscape blanket share 50 km %166
Land share of disc %53100
Park area within 2 km13 hectares120 hectares
Good for families. Lyon leads by 34 points.34
CannesLyon
Score2559
Tourist attractions within 2 km725
Park area within 2 km13 hectares120 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km32
Sights concentration. Cannes leads by 2 points.2
CannesLyon
Score5654
Notable places within 2 km9586
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Cannes and Lyon are level on 62.
CannesLyon
Score6262
Price level global73.773.7
Daily budget€160€160
Year-round weather. Cannes leads by 10 points.10
CannesLyon
Score7464
Monthly daytime high13.3 °C to 27.9 °C7 °C to 28 °C
Monthly rainfall13 mm to 138 mm43 mm to 101 mm
Dry months30
0255075100

Where they differ

Cannes has 68 beaches nearby against Lyon's 26, and four months when the sea holds 21°C or more, which Lyon has none of. Its summers are also the drier of the two, so beach days come with fewer interruptions.

Lyon is the stronger city after dark, with many times as many places to drink and about twice as many nightclubs, most of them near the centre. For families it has roughly three times as many attractions close in, plus far more park space to absorb an afternoon.

Where they are alike

Neither is the obvious base for day trips, and they reach that point from opposite directions: 17% of the land around Cannes is protected against 6% around Lyon, while Lyon holds far more park space close in. Both have 2 UNESCO-listed places within day-trip reach.

Walking-distance sightseeing is a draw, with about as many notable places near the centre in each. Both also top out at 28°C in high summer.

Which traveller are you?

Swimmers and sun-seekers should take Cannes. It has 68 beaches nearby, four months of sea at 21°C or above, and the drier summer, which is the combination Lyon cannot offer at all.

Anyone travelling to eat and go out should take Lyon: about three times as many restaurants near the centre, a much wider range of kitchens, many more bars and around twice as many nightclubs.

Families split by age. Lyon has roughly three times as many attractions close in and much more park space; Cannes counters with the beaches and 3 theme parks within reach against Lyon's 2.

What the numbers don't tell you

The value figures carry no information here. Both cities sit on the same national price level, so the comparison tells you nothing about which trip costs less, and the €160 daily budget is a single national estimate rather than a measurement of either place.

Cannes's beach strength is concentrated into a short window. The sea is only swimmable for four months, and those are exactly the months a town of 74,400 residents fills up. Outside them the coast turns wet, with November above 130mm, so the beach advantage disappears in the shoulder seasons rather than tapering off.

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
Cannes
13
14
15
17
21
25
28
28
25
21
17
14
Lyon
7
9
14
17
21
26
28
28
23
18
11
8
Sea temperature, °C
Cannes
14
13
14
15
18
21
24
25
23
20
18
16
Lyon
No coastline within reach
Rainfall, mm
Cannes
74
53
51
69
42
34
13
18
84
124
138
91
Lyon
51
43
50
68
82
73
66
68
84
101
88
54
Daylight, hours per day
Cannes
9
11
12
13
15
15
15
14
13
11
10
9
Lyon
9
10
12
14
15
16
15
14
13
11
10
9
Sunshine, hours per day
Cannes
5
6
7
7
9
10
11
11
8
6
5
5
Lyon
2
3
6
6
7
9
9
8
6
4
3
2

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. Cannes: 1991-2020 normals, Nice (18 km from centre). Lyon: 1991-2020 normals, Lyon / Bron (10.6 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Cannes is the better pick from June to September, with highs of 25-28°C, sea at 21-25°C and very little rain in July and August. Its wet season comes later, with October and November both above 120mm.

Lyon works from May to September and reaches 28°C in high summer, but rain is spread through the year, at 66-84mm across those same summer months, so a warm day is not reliably a dry one. Winter is cold, with January highs of 7°C.

Getting there

Flying fromCannesLyon
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
1 h 30 m
€78-111
NCE · 20 km
1 h 10 m
no fares
LYS · 20 km
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
1 h 55 m
€76-223
NCE · 20 km
1 h 35 m
no fares
LYS · 20 km
IstanbulIST, SAW
2 h 45 m
€202-329
NCE · 20 km
3 h 0 m
€167-217
LYS · 20 km
RomeFCO, CIA
1 h 10 m
€69-133
NCE · 20 km
1 h 30 m
€79-99
LYS · 20 km
AmsterdamAMS
1 h 50 m
€170-248
NCE · 20 km
1 h 30 m
no fares
LYS · 20 km
BordeauxBOD
1 h 25 m
no fares
NCE · 20 km
1 h 15 m
no fares
LYS · 20 km
BarcelonaBCN
1 h 15 m
€83-135
NCE · 20 km
1 h 20 m
€70-92
LYS · 20 km
NantesNTE
1 h 35 m
€129-163
NCE · 20 km
1 h 20 m
no fares
LYS · 20 km
TunisTUN
1 h 35 m
€148-281
NCE · 20 km
1 h 55 m
no fares
LYS · 20 km
MontrealYUL, YHU, YMX
7 h 55 m
no fares
NCE · 20 km
7 h 35 m
€446-565
1 stop
LYS · 20 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

MeasureCannesLyon
Official languageFrenchFrench
CurrencyEuro (EUR)Euro (EUR)
SocketsCE230 V, 50 HzCE230 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideRightRight
Time zoneUTC+1, UTC+2 in summerUTC+1, UTC+2 in summer
Emergency number112112
Elevation0 m160 m
Main airportNice-Côte d'Azur Airport (NCE)20 km from centre129 non-stop destinationsLyon Saint-Exupéry Airport (LYS)20 km from centre139 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year11 days11 days

By the numbers

MeasureCannesLyon
City population74,350519,127
People per km²3,79310,838
Museums within 10 km1642
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km22
Distinct cuisines in the centre38148
Swim season, months above 21 °C4 months–

Where else could you go?

Every comparison below shares a destination with this one, so you can follow Cannes or Lyon 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). Weather data by Meteostat. Meteorological data provided by NOAA, DWD and others. Sea surface temperature from NOAA OISST v2.1, NOAA Physical Sciences Laboratory. Airport data from OurAirports (public domain). Tourism statistics from Eurostat, © European Union, reused under CC BY 4.0. Public holidays from Nager.Date (MIT). 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. 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. Exchange rates via Frankfurter, based on European Central Bank reference rates.

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.