VacationSelector

Cape Town or La Spezia?

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 sights concentration and places to eat with your weighting.

La Spezia
43
match

Wins on nature & day trips and beaches & swimming 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 TownLa Spezia
Beaches & swimming. La Spezia leads by 13 points.13
Cape TownLa Spezia
Score6073
Swim season months04
Beaches 10 km2932
Coast distance1 km0 km
Water distance1 km0 km
Places to eat. Cape Town leads by 36 points.36
Cape TownLa Spezia
Score6731
Restaurants within 2 km of centre650235
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km4211
Museums & heritage. Cape Town leads by 12 points.12
Cape TownLa Spezia
Score5442
Museums within 10 km2515
Museums within 2 km of centre2010
Share of museums within 2 km %8067
Unesco sites within 50 km32
Nightlife. Cape Town leads by 23 points.23
Cape TownLa Spezia
Score4724
Drinking venues within 4 km483208
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre389176
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %8185
Nightclubs within 4 km471
Nature & day trips. La Spezia leads by 16 points.16
Cape TownLa Spezia
Score3652
Protected land share 50 km %613
Landscape blanket share 50 km %00
Land share of disc %4251
Park area within 2 km27 hectares23 hectares
Good for families. Cape Town leads by 16 points.16
Cape TownLa Spezia
Score3620
Tourist attractions within 2 km193
Park area within 2 km27 hectares23 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km02
Sights concentration. Cape Town leads by 38 points.38
Cape TownLa Spezia
Score457
Notable places within 2 km516
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Cape Town leads by 17 points.17
Cape TownLa Spezia
Score8568
Price level global40.564.9
Daily budget€155
Year-round weather. Cape Town leads by 16 points.16
Cape TownLa Spezia
Score8670
Monthly daytime high18 °C to 27.5 °C11.4 °C to 30.3 °C
Monthly rainfall10 mm to 97 mm32 mm to 132 mm
Dry months62
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
La Spezia
11
13
16
18
23
27
30
30
26
21
16
12
Sea temperature, °C
Cape Town
18
18
17
16
15
15
15
15
15
15
16
17
La Spezia
14
13
14
15
18
22
24
25
23
20
18
16
Rainfall, mm
Cape Town
10
11
13
42
65
97
89
76
47
32
27
13
La Spezia
68
58
59
65
63
41
32
35
102
125
132
95
Daylight, hours per day
Cape Town
14
13
12
11
10
10
10
11
12
13
14
14
La Spezia
9
10
12
13
15
15
15
14
13
11
10
9
Sunshine, hours per day
Cape Town
12
10
9
8
6
6
6
7
8
9
10
11
La Spezia
4
4
6
6
8
9
11
10
7
5
4
3

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). La Spezia: 1991-2020 normals, Pisa / S. Giusto (64.8 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromCape TownLa Spezia
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
12 h 5 m
€634-815
CPT · 18 km
2 h 5 m
€48-62
PSA · 65 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
11 h 40 m
€742-801
2 stops
CPT · 18 km
1 h 40 m
no fares
PSA · 65 km
FrankfurtFRA, HHN
11 h 45 m
€632-724
1 stop
CPT · 18 km
1 h 30 m
no fares
PSA · 65 km
AmsterdamAMS
12 h 5 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km
1 h 55 m
€210-262
1 stop
PSA · 65 km
ZurichZRH
11 h 25 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km
1 h 10 m
no fares
FLR · 115 km
MunichMUC
11 h 30 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km
1 h 15 m
€207-240
1 stop
GOA · 86 km
IstanbulIST, SAW
10 h 35 m
€717-799
1 stop
CPT · 18 km
2 h 25 m
€154-191
1 stop
BLQ · 125 km
DubaiDXB, DWC
9 h 40 m
€611-615
1 stop
CPT · 18 km
5 h 55 m
no fares
BLQ · 125 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 TownLa Spezia
Official languageEnglish, Zulu, Xhosa, Afrikaans, Venda, Northern Sotho, Swazi, Tswana, Tsonga, Sesotho, Southern Ndebele, South African Sign LanguageItalian
CurrencyRand (ZAR)Euro (EUR)
SocketsCMN230 V, 50 HzCFL230 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideLeftRight
Time zoneUTC+2UTC+1, UTC+2 in summer
Emergency number112112
Elevation5 m3 m
Main airportCape Town International Airport (CPT)18 km from centre44 non-stop destinationsPisa International Airport (PSA)65 km from centre81 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year12 days13 days

By the numbers

MeasureCape TownLa Spezia
City population3,776,31392,119
People per km²1,5381,792
Museums within 10 km2212
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km32
Distinct cuisines in the centre6522
Swim season, months above 21 °CNone4 months

Where else could you go?

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