VacationSelector

Cape Town or Dresden?

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

Your match

Cape Town
✓ Best match
57
match

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

Dresden
48
match

Wins on good for families 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.

Cape TownDresden
Beaches & swimming. Cape Town leads by 60 points.60
Cape TownDresden
Score600
Swim season months00
Beaches 10 km2922
Coast distance1 km267 km
Water distance1 km
Places to eat. Cape Town leads by 6 points.6
Cape TownDresden
Score6761
Restaurants within 2 km of centre650422
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km4242
Museums & heritage. Cape Town and Dresden are level on 54.
Cape TownDresden
Score5454
Museums within 10 km2566
Museums within 2 km of centre2034
Share of museums within 2 km %8052
Unesco sites within 50 km31
Nightlife. Cape Town leads by 5 points.5
Cape TownDresden
Score4742
Drinking venues within 4 km483359
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre389265
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %8174
Nightclubs within 4 km4743
Nature & day trips. Dresden leads by 3 points.3
Cape TownDresden
Score3639
Protected land share 50 km %614
Landscape blanket share 50 km %09
Land share of disc %42100
Park area within 2 km27 hectares80 hectares
Good for families. Dresden leads by 23 points.23
Cape TownDresden
Score3659
Tourist attractions within 2 km1932
Park area within 2 km27 hectares80 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km02
Sights concentration. Dresden leads by 8 points.8
Cape TownDresden
Score4553
Notable places within 2 km5182
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Cape Town leads by 25 points.25
Cape TownDresden
Score8560
Price level global40.575.9
Daily budget€163
Year-round weather. Cape Town leads by 24 points.24
Cape TownDresden
Score8662
Monthly daytime high18 °C to 27.5 °C4 °C to 26.2 °C
Monthly rainfall10 mm to 97 mm31 mm to 83 mm
Dry months64
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
Cape Town
27
28
26
24
21
18
18
18
20
22
24
26
Dresden
4
6
10
17
21
24
26
26
21
15
9
6
Sea temperature, °C
Cape Town
18
18
17
16
15
15
15
15
15
15
16
17
Dresden
No coastline within reach
Rainfall, mm
Cape Town
10
11
13
42
65
97
89
76
47
32
27
13
Dresden
46
31
36
36
64
72
80
83
55
49
40
45
Daylight, hours per day
Cape Town
14
13
12
11
10
10
10
11
12
13
14
14
Dresden
9
10
12
14
16
17
16
15
13
11
9
8
Sunshine, hours per day
Cape Town
12
10
9
8
6
6
6
7
8
9
10
11
Dresden
2
3
4
6
7
7
7
7
6
4
2
2

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. Cape Town: 1991-2020 normals, Cape Town Airport (17.5 km from centre). Dresden: 1991-2020 normals, Dresden-Strehlen (3.8 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromCape TownDresden
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
11 h 40 m
€742-801
2 stops
CPT · 18 km
1 h 40 m
€86-113
PRG · 112 km
AmsterdamAMS
12 h 5 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km
1 h 30 m
€163-247
PRG · 112 km
IstanbulIST, SAW
10 h 35 m
€717-799
1 stop
CPT · 18 km
2 h 25 m
€118-136
PRG · 112 km
FrankfurtFRA, HHN
11 h 45 m
€632-724
1 stop
CPT · 18 km
1 h 5 m
no fares
DRS · 10 km
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
15 h 25 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km
8 h 10 m
€737
BER · 147 km
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
12 h 5 m
€634-815
CPT · 18 km
1 h 40 m
no fares
LEJ · 113 km
MunichMUC
11 h 30 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km
1 h 5 m
no fares
DRS · 10 km
ZurichZRH
11 h 25 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km
1 h 20 m
no fares
DRS · 10 km
DubaiDXB, DWC
9 h 40 m
€611-615
1 stop
CPT · 18 km
5 h 55 m
€276-321
1 stop
PRG · 112 km
DohaDOH
9 h 25 m
€850-932
2 stops
CPT · 18 km
5 h 40 m
no fares
PRG · 112 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 2026-09 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

MeasureCape TownDresden
Official languageEnglish, Zulu, Xhosa, Afrikaans, Venda, Northern Sotho, Swazi, Tswana, Tsonga, Sesotho, Southern Ndebele, South African Sign LanguageGerman
CurrencyRand (ZAR)Euro (EUR)
SocketsCMN230 V, 50 HzCF230 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideLeftRight
Time zoneUTC+2UTC+1, UTC+2 in summer
Emergency number112112
Elevation5 m126 m
Main airportCape Town International Airport (CPT)18 km from centre44 non-stop destinationsDresden Airport (DRS)10 km from centre12 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year12 days11 days

By the numbers

MeasureCape TownDresden
City population3,776,313564,904
People per km²1,5381,720
Museums within 10 km2270
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km31
Distinct cuisines in the centre6577
Swim season, months above 21 °CNone

Where else could you go?

Every comparison below shares a destination with this one, so you can follow Cape Town or Dresden 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). 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. 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.