VacationSelector

Cape Town or Los Angeles?

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 value for money and beaches & swimming with your weighting.

Los Angeles
53
match

Wins on nature & day trips 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 TownLos Angeles
Beaches & swimming. Cape Town leads by 31 points.31
Cape TownLos Angeles
Score6029
Swim season months00
Beaches 10 km290
Coast distance1 km—
Water distance1 km—
Beaches 25 km—11
Warmest sea temp—20.2 °C
Scoring variant—beachScoreWideRing
Declared—2026-08-25
Register—seed/editorial-overrides.json
Places to eat. Cape Town leads by 1 points.1
Cape TownLos Angeles
Score6766
Restaurants within 2 km of centre6501,337
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km4222
Museums & heritage. Cape Town leads by 5 points.5
Cape TownLos Angeles
Score5449
Museums within 10 km2569
Museums within 2 km of centre2023
Share of museums within 2 km %8033
Unesco sites within 50 km31
Nightlife. Los Angeles leads by 7 points.7
Cape TownLos Angeles
Score4754
Drinking venues within 4 km483660
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre389432
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %8165
Nightclubs within 4 km4764
Nature & day trips. Los Angeles leads by 26 points.26
Cape TownLos Angeles
Score3662
Protected land share 50 km %626
Landscape blanket share 50 km %00
Land share of disc %4280
Park area within 2 km27 hectares20 hectares
Good for families. Cape Town leads by 3 points.3
Cape TownLos Angeles
Score3633
Tourist attractions within 2 km1911
Park area within 2 km27 hectares20 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km02
Sights concentration. Los Angeles leads by 9 points.9
Cape TownLos Angeles
Score4554
Notable places within 2 km5188
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Cape Town leads by 42 points.42
Cape TownLos Angeles
Score8543
Price level global40.5100
Daily budget——
Year-round weather. Los Angeles leads by 1 points.1
Cape TownLos Angeles
Score8687
Monthly daytime high18 °C to 27.5 °C18.6 °C to 24.7 °C
Monthly rainfall10 mm to 97 mm0 mm to 76 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
Los Angeles
19
19
19
20
21
22
24
25
25
24
22
19
Sea temperature, °C
Cape Town
18
18
17
16
15
15
15
15
15
15
16
17
Los Angeles
15
15
15
15
17
18
20
20
20
19
17
16
Rainfall, mm
Cape Town
10
11
13
42
65
97
89
76
47
32
27
13
Los Angeles
73
76
44
16
7
2
1
0
3
13
21
57
Daylight, hours per day
Cape Town
14
13
12
11
10
10
10
11
12
13
14
14
Los Angeles
10
11
12
13
14
14
14
13
12
11
10
10
Sunshine, hours per day
Cape Town
12
10
9
8
6
6
6
7
8
9
10
11
Los Angeles
No sunshine record

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). Los Angeles: 1991-2020 normals, Los Angeles Airport (18.5 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromCape TownLos Angeles
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
12 h 5 m
€634-815
CPT · 18 km
11 h 0 m
no fares
LAX · 19 km
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
15 h 25 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km
5 h 20 m
no fares
LAX · 19 km
WashingtonIAD, DCA
15 h 40 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km
5 h 0 m
€196-293
1 stop
LAX · 19 km
AtlantaATL, PDK
16 h 5 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km
4 h 20 m
€288
LAX · 19 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
11 h 40 m
€742-801
2 stops
CPT · 18 km
11 h 25 m
€600-640
1 stop
LAX · 19 km
FrankfurtFRA, HHN
11 h 45 m
€632-724
1 stop
CPT · 18 km
11 h 40 m
no fares
LAX · 19 km
DubaiDXB, DWC
9 h 40 m
€611-615
1 stop
CPT · 18 km
16 h 25 m
€964-1015
LAX · 19 km
Sao PauloGRU, VCP, CGH, RTE
8 h 10 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km
12 h 20 m
no fares
LAX · 19 km
SingaporeSIN, XSP
12 h 0 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km
17 h 15 m
no fares
LAX · 19 km
MunichMUC
11 h 30 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km
12 h 0 m
no fares
LAX · 19 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 TownLos Angeles
Official languageEnglish, Zulu, Xhosa, Afrikaans, Venda, Northern Sotho, Swazi, Tswana, Tsonga, Sesotho, Southern Ndebele, South African Sign Language–
CurrencyRand (ZAR)US Dollar (USD)
SocketsCMN230 V, 50 HzAB120 V, 60 Hz
Driving sideLeftRight
Time zoneUTC+2UTC-8, UTC-7 in summer
Emergency number112911
Elevation5 m106 m
Main airportCape Town International Airport (CPT)18 km from centre44 non-stop destinationsLos Angeles International Airport (LAX)19 km from centre180 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year12 days13 days

By the numbers

MeasureCape TownLos Angeles
City population3,776,3133,898,747
People per km²1,5382,994
Museums within 10 km2238
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km31
Distinct cuisines in the centre6546
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 Los Angeles 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.