VacationSelector

Cape Town or Limassol?

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.

Limassol
46
match

Wins on 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 TownLimassol
Beaches & swimming. Limassol leads by 19 points.19
Cape TownLimassol
Score6079
Swim season months06
Beaches 10 km2927
Coast distance1 km1 km
Water distance1 km1 km
Places to eat. Cape Town leads by 24 points.24
Cape TownLimassol
Score6743
Restaurants within 2 km of centre650298
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km4219
Museums & heritage. Cape Town leads by 10 points.10
Cape TownLimassol
Score5444
Museums within 10 km2517
Museums within 2 km of centre2010
Share of museums within 2 km %8059
Unesco sites within 50 km33
Nightlife. Cape Town leads by 8 points.8
Cape TownLimassol
Score4739
Drinking venues within 4 km483340
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre389256
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %8175
Nightclubs within 4 km4720
Nature & day trips. Cape Town leads by 14 points.14
Cape TownLimassol
Score3622
Protected land share 50 km %62
Landscape blanket share 50 km %00
Land share of disc %4249
Park area within 2 km27 hectares32 hectares
Good for families. Cape Town leads by 20 points.20
Cape TownLimassol
Score3616
Tourist attractions within 2 km193
Park area within 2 km27 hectares32 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km00
Sights concentration. Cape Town leads by 31 points.31
Cape TownLimassol
Score4514
Notable places within 2 km519
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Cape Town leads by 15 points.15
Cape TownLimassol
Score8570
Price level global40.561.4
Daily budget—€129
Year-round weather. Cape Town leads by 1 points.1
Cape TownLimassol
Score8685
Monthly daytime high18 °C to 27.5 °C16.5 °C to 31.2 °C
Monthly rainfall10 mm to 97 mm0 mm to 98 mm
Dry months68
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
Limassol
17
17
19
22
25
29
31
31
30
27
23
19
Sea temperature, °C
Cape Town
18
18
17
16
15
15
15
15
15
15
16
17
Limassol
18
17
17
18
20
23
26
27
26
25
22
20
Rainfall, mm
Cape Town
10
11
13
42
65
97
89
76
47
32
27
13
Limassol
81
47
29
17
10
2
1
0
5
14
42
98
Daylight, hours per day
Cape Town
14
13
12
11
10
10
10
11
12
13
14
14
Limassol
10
11
12
13
14
14
14
14
12
11
10
10
Sunshine, hours per day
Cape Town
12
10
9
8
6
6
6
7
8
9
10
11
Limassol
6
6
8
9
11
12
13
12
10
9
7
6

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). Limassol: 1998-2020 (sunshine 1991-2020, rainfall 1991-2020) normals, Akrotiri (11.6 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromCape TownLimassol
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
12 h 5 m
€634-815
CPT · 18 km
4 h 25 m
€125-167
PFO · 51 km
AmsterdamAMS
12 h 5 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km
4 h 5 m
€253-340
1 stop
PFO · 51 km
FrankfurtFRA, HHN
11 h 45 m
€632-724
1 stop
CPT · 18 km
3 h 45 m
no fares
LCA · 58 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
11 h 40 m
€742-801
2 stops
CPT · 18 km
4 h 5 m
€197-331
1 stop
PFO · 51 km
ZurichZRH
11 h 25 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km
3 h 35 m
no fares
LCA · 58 km
MunichMUC
11 h 30 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km
3 h 25 m
no fares
LCA · 58 km
IstanbulIST, SAW
10 h 35 m
€717-799
1 stop
CPT · 18 km
1 h 35 m
no fares
ECN · 68 km
DubaiDXB, DWC
9 h 40 m
€611-615
1 stop
CPT · 18 km
3 h 25 m
no fares
LCA · 58 km
DohaDOH
9 h 25 m
€850-932
2 stops
CPT · 18 km
3 h 5 m
no fares
LCA · 58 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 TownLimassol
Official languageEnglish, Zulu, Xhosa, Afrikaans, Venda, Northern Sotho, Swazi, Tswana, Tsonga, Sesotho, Southern Ndebele, South African Sign LanguageTurkish, Greek, Modern Greek
CurrencyRand (ZAR)Euro (EUR)
SocketsCMN230 V, 50 HzG240 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideLeftLeft
Time zoneUTC+2UTC+2, UTC+3 in summer
Emergency number112112
Elevation5 m10 m
Main airportCape Town International Airport (CPT)18 km from centre44 non-stop destinationsLarnaca International Airport (LCA)58 km from centre109 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year12 days17 days

By the numbers

MeasureCape TownLimassol
City population3,776,313107,970
People per km²1,5382,405
Museums within 10 km222
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km33
Distinct cuisines in the centre6528
Swim season, months above 21 °CNone6 months

Where else could you go?

Every comparison below shares a destination with this one, so you can follow Cape Town or Limassol 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. Ground elevations sampled from the Mapzen terrain tiles via OpenTopoData, merging SRTM, ASTER, NED, EU-DEM and national sources. 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.