VacationSelector

Cape Town or Lisbon?

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

Your match

Cape Town
57
match

Wins on value for money and year-round weather with your weighting.

Lisbon
✓ Best match
68
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 TownLisbon
Beaches & swimming. Cape Town leads by 3 points.3
Cape TownLisbon
Score6057
Swim season months00
Beaches 10 km2924
Coast distance1 km2 km
Water distance1 km2 km
Places to eat. Lisbon leads by 13 points.13
Cape TownLisbon
Score6780
Restaurants within 2 km of centre6502,496
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km4231
Museums & heritage. Lisbon leads by 16 points.16
Cape TownLisbon
Score5470
Museums within 10 km25124
Museums within 2 km of centre2054
Share of museums within 2 km %8044
Unesco sites within 50 km33
Nightlife. Lisbon leads by 18 points.18
Cape TownLisbon
Score4765
Drinking venues within 4 km4831,225
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre389956
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %8178
Nightclubs within 4 km4765
Nature & day trips. Lisbon leads by 20 points.20
Cape TownLisbon
Score3656
Protected land share 50 km %611
Landscape blanket share 50 km %00
Land share of disc %4254
Park area within 2 km27 hectares77 hectares
Good for families. Lisbon leads by 33 points.33
Cape TownLisbon
Score3669
Tourist attractions within 2 km1982
Park area within 2 km27 hectares77 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km01
Sights concentration. Lisbon leads by 21 points.21
Cape TownLisbon
Score4566
Notable places within 2 km51169
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Cape Town leads by 11 points.11
Cape TownLisbon
Score8574
Price level global40.555.9
Daily budget€109
Year-round weather. Cape Town leads by 8 points.8
Cape TownLisbon
Score8678
Monthly daytime high18 °C to 27.5 °C14.9 °C to 28.4 °C
Monthly rainfall10 mm to 97 mm3 mm to 121 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
Lisbon
15
16
19
20
23
26
28
28
26
23
18
15
Sea temperature, °C
Cape Town
18
18
17
16
15
15
15
15
15
15
16
17
Lisbon
15
15
15
15
16
18
18
19
19
18
17
16
Rainfall, mm
Cape Town
10
11
13
42
65
97
89
76
47
32
27
13
Lisbon
104
73
72
67
53
13
3
7
36
108
121
102
Daylight, hours per day
Cape Town
14
13
12
11
10
10
10
11
12
13
14
14
Lisbon
10
11
12
13
14
15
15
14
13
11
10
10
Sunshine, hours per day
Cape Town
12
10
9
8
6
6
6
7
8
9
10
11
Lisbon
5
6
7
8
10
11
12
11
8
7
5
5

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). Lisbon: 1991-2020 normals, Lisboa / Geof (1.1 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromCape TownLisbon
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
12 h 5 m
€634-815
CPT · 18 km
2 h 30 m
€112-185
LIS · 7 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
11 h 40 m
€742-801
2 stops
CPT · 18 km
2 h 25 m
€118-145
LIS · 7 km
Sao PauloGRU, VCP, CGH, RTE
8 h 10 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km
10 h 0 m
€744-1049
1 stop
LIS · 7 km
FrankfurtFRA, HHN
11 h 45 m
€632-724
1 stop
CPT · 18 km
2 h 50 m
€164-250
1 stop
LIS · 7 km
AmsterdamAMS
12 h 5 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km
2 h 50 m
€167-189
LIS · 7 km
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
15 h 25 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km
7 h 0 m
€621-718
1 stop
LIS · 7 km
ZurichZRH
11 h 25 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km
2 h 40 m
€227-271
1 stop
LIS · 7 km
MunichMUC
11 h 30 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km
3 h 0 m
€222-263
1 stop
LIS · 7 km
LuandaLAD, NBJ
4 h 0 m
€669-689
CPT · 18 km
7 h 30 m
€567-920
LIS · 7 km
DubaiDXB, DWC
9 h 40 m
€611-615
1 stop
CPT · 18 km
7 h 55 m
€421-500
2 stops
LIS · 7 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 TownLisbon
Official languageEnglish, Zulu, Xhosa, Afrikaans, Venda, Northern Sotho, Swazi, Tswana, Tsonga, Sesotho, Southern Ndebele, South African Sign LanguagePortuguese
CurrencyRand (ZAR)Euro (EUR)
SocketsCMN230 V, 50 HzCF230 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideLeftRight
Time zoneUTC+2UTC, UTC+1 in summer
Emergency number112112
Elevation5 m100 m
Main airportCape Town International Airport (CPT)18 km from centre44 non-stop destinationsLisbon Humberto Delgado Airport (LIS)7 km from centre153 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year12 days14 days

By the numbers

MeasureCape TownLisbon
City population3,776,313545,796
People per km²1,5385,453
Museums within 10 km2278
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km33
Distinct cuisines in the centre65106
Swim season, months above 21 °CNoneNone

Where else could you go?

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