VacationSelector

Cape Town or Lima?

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

Your match

Too close to call, 2 points apart

Cape Town
57
match

Wins on beaches & swimming and places to eat with your weighting.

Lima
55
match

Wins on good for families 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.

Cape TownLima
Beaches & swimming. Cape Town leads by 23 points.23
Cape TownLima
Score6037
Swim season months02
Beaches 10 km2912
Coast distance1 km6 km
Water distance1 km6 km
Places to eat. Cape Town leads by 15 points.15
Cape TownLima
Score6752
Restaurants within 2 km of centre650796
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km4214
Museums & heritage. Lima leads by 10 points.10
Cape TownLima
Score5464
Museums within 10 km2589
Museums within 2 km of centre2047
Share of museums within 2 km %8053
Unesco sites within 50 km32
Nightlife. Cape Town leads by 2 points.2
Cape TownLima
Score4745
Drinking venues within 4 km483409
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre389177
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %8143
Nightclubs within 4 km4763
Nature & day trips. Cape Town leads by 9 points.9
Cape TownLima
Score3627
Protected land share 50 km %62
Landscape blanket share 50 km %00
Land share of disc %4251
Park area within 2 km27 hectares54 hectares
Good for families. Lima leads by 20 points.20
Cape TownLima
Score3656
Tourist attractions within 2 km1925
Park area within 2 km27 hectares54 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km04
Sights concentration. Lima leads by 1 points.1
Cape TownLima
Score4546
Notable places within 2 km5154
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Cape Town leads by 5 points.5
Cape TownLima
Score8580
Price level global40.547.7
Daily budget——
Year-round weather. Lima leads by 6 points.6
Cape TownLima
Score8692
Monthly daytime high18 °C to 27.5 °C18.6 °C to 27.4 °C
Monthly rainfall10 mm to 97 mm0 mm to 1 mm
Dry months612
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
Lima
26
27
27
25
22
20
19
19
19
20
22
24
Sea temperature, °C
Cape Town
18
18
17
16
15
15
15
15
15
15
16
17
Lima
21
22
21
20
19
18
18
17
17
17
18
19
Rainfall, mm
Cape Town
10
11
13
42
65
97
89
76
47
32
27
13
Lima
1
1
0
0
1
1
1
1
1
1
0
1
Daylight, hours per day
Cape Town
14
13
12
11
10
10
10
11
12
13
14
14
Lima
13
13
12
12
12
11
12
12
12
12
13
13
Sunshine, hours per day
Cape Town
12
10
9
8
6
6
6
7
8
9
10
11
Lima
5
5
6
6
3
1
1
1
1
2
3
4

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). Lima: 1991-2020 normals, Lima-Callao / Aerop. Internacional Jorgechavez (10.9 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromCape TownLima
Sao PauloGRU, VCP, CGH, RTE
8 h 10 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km
4 h 45 m
€282-372
LIM · 9 km
AtlantaATL, PDK
16 h 5 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km
6 h 45 m
no fares
LIM · 9 km
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
15 h 25 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km
7 h 35 m
no fares
LIM · 9 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
11 h 40 m
€742-801
2 stops
CPT · 18 km
12 h 45 m
no fares
LIM · 9 km
AmsterdamAMS
12 h 5 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km
13 h 5 m
€876-946
1 stop
LIM · 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 2026-09 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 TownLima
Official languageEnglish, Zulu, Xhosa, Afrikaans, Venda, Northern Sotho, Swazi, Tswana, Tsonga, Sesotho, Southern Ndebele, South African Sign LanguageSpanish, Aymara, Quechua
CurrencyRand (ZAR)Sol (PEN)
SocketsCMN230 V, 50 HzABC220 V, 60 Hz
Driving sideLeftRight
Time zoneUTC+2UTC-5
Emergency number112111 or 911
Elevation5 m154 m
Main airportCape Town International Airport (CPT)18 km from centre44 non-stop destinationsJorge Chávez International Airport (LIM)9 km from centre63 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year12 days14 days

By the numbers

MeasureCape TownLima
City population3,776,3139,943,800
People per km²1,5383,721
Museums within 10 km2246
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km32
Distinct cuisines in the centre6533
Swim season, months above 21 °CNone2 months

Where else could you go?

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