VacationSelector

Cape Town or Madrid?

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 beaches & swimming and value for money with your weighting.

Madrid
✓ Best match
66
match

Wins on good for families and nightlife 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 TownMadrid
Beaches & swimming. Cape Town leads by 60 points.60
Cape TownMadrid
Score600
Swim season months00
Beaches 10 km294
Coast distance1 km305 km
Water distance1 km—
Places to eat. Madrid leads by 16 points.16
Cape TownMadrid
Score6783
Restaurants within 2 km of centre6503,508
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km4228
Museums & heritage. Madrid leads by 21 points.21
Cape TownMadrid
Score5475
Museums within 10 km2597
Museums within 2 km of centre2059
Share of museums within 2 km %8061
Unesco sites within 50 km34
Nightlife. Madrid leads by 34 points.34
Cape TownMadrid
Score4781
Drinking venues within 4 km4832,414
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre3891,498
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %8162
Nightclubs within 4 km47341
Nature & day trips. Madrid leads by 27 points.27
Cape TownMadrid
Score3663
Protected land share 50 km %619
Landscape blanket share 50 km %00
Land share of disc %42100
Park area within 2 km27 hectares187 hectares
Good for families. Madrid leads by 41 points.41
Cape TownMadrid
Score3677
Tourist attractions within 2 km1961
Park area within 2 km27 hectares187 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km03
Sights concentration. Madrid leads by 30 points.30
Cape TownMadrid
Score4575
Notable places within 2 km51288
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Cape Town leads by 14 points.14
Cape TownMadrid
Score8571
Price level global40.560.8
Daily budget—€122
Year-round weather. Cape Town leads by 14 points.14
Cape TownMadrid
Score8672
Monthly daytime high18 °C to 27.5 °C10 °C to 32.7 °C
Monthly rainfall10 mm to 97 mm9 mm to 64 mm
Dry months67
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
Madrid
10
12
16
19
23
29
33
32
27
20
14
10
Sea temperature, °C
Cape Town
18
18
17
16
15
15
15
15
15
15
16
17
Madrid
No coastline within reach
Rainfall, mm
Cape Town
10
11
13
42
65
97
89
76
47
32
27
13
Madrid
32
34
35
46
49
20
9
10
24
64
53
42
Daylight, hours per day
Cape Town
14
13
12
11
10
10
10
11
12
13
14
14
Madrid
10
11
12
13
14
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
Madrid
5
5
7
8
9
11
12
11
9
6
5
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). Madrid: 1991-2020 normals, Madrid (1.7 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromCape TownMadrid
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
12 h 5 m
€634-815
CPT · 18 km
2 h 10 m
€52-105
MAD · 14 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
11 h 40 m
€742-801
2 stops
CPT · 18 km
1 h 55 m
€95-123
MAD · 14 km
JohannesburgJNB, HLA
2 h 10 m
€162-179
CPT · 18 km
10 h 10 m
no fares
MAD · 14 km
FrankfurtFRA, HHN
11 h 45 m
€632-724
1 stop
CPT · 18 km
2 h 20 m
€121-231
1 stop
MAD · 14 km
AmsterdamAMS
12 h 5 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km
2 h 25 m
€175-213
MAD · 14 km
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
15 h 25 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km
7 h 25 m
€496-659
1 stop
MAD · 14 km
MunichMUC
11 h 30 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km
2 h 25 m
€193-236
1 stop
MAD · 14 km
Sao PauloGRU, VCP, CGH, RTE
8 h 10 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km
10 h 30 m
€636-955
1 stop
MAD · 14 km
ZurichZRH
11 h 25 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km
2 h 5 m
€191-243
1 stop
MAD · 14 km
IstanbulIST, SAW
10 h 35 m
€717-799
1 stop
CPT · 18 km
3 h 50 m
€182-348
MAD · 14 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 TownMadrid
Official languageEnglish, Zulu, Xhosa, Afrikaans, Venda, Northern Sotho, Swazi, Tswana, Tsonga, Sesotho, Southern Ndebele, South African Sign LanguageSpanish
CurrencyRand (ZAR)Euro (EUR)
SocketsCMN230 V, 50 HzCF230 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideLeftRight
Time zoneUTC+2UTC+1, UTC+2 in summer
Emergency number112112
Elevation5 m663 m
Main airportCape Town International Airport (CPT)18 km from centre44 non-stop destinationsAdolfo Suárez Madrid–Barajas Airport (MAD)14 km from centre236 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year12 days12 days

By the numbers

MeasureCape TownMadrid
City population3,776,3133,506,730
People per km²1,5385,801
Museums within 10 km2288
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km34
Distinct cuisines in the centre65106
Swim season, months above 21 °CNone–

Where else could you go?

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