VacationSelector

Cape Town or Marrakech?

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 beaches & swimming and places to eat with your weighting.

Marrakech
50
match

Wins on good for families and nature & day trips 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 TownMarrakech
Beaches & swimming. Cape Town leads by 60 points.60
Cape TownMarrakech
Score600
Swim season months00
Beaches 10 km290
Coast distance1 km134 km
Water distance1 km
Places to eat. Cape Town leads by 13 points.13
Cape TownMarrakech
Score6754
Restaurants within 2 km of centre650461
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km4226
Museums & heritage. Cape Town leads by 10 points.10
Cape TownMarrakech
Score5444
Museums within 10 km2522
Museums within 2 km of centre2017
Share of museums within 2 km %8077
Unesco sites within 50 km31
Nightlife. Cape Town leads by 10 points.10
Cape TownMarrakech
Score4737
Drinking venues within 4 km483282
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre389161
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %8157
Nightclubs within 4 km4732
Nature & day trips. Marrakech leads by 16 points.16
Cape TownMarrakech
Score3652
Protected land share 50 km %6
Landscape blanket share 50 km %00
Land share of disc %42100
Park area within 2 km27 hectares47 hectares
Good for families. Marrakech leads by 17 points.17
Cape TownMarrakech
Score3653
Tourist attractions within 2 km1928
Park area within 2 km27 hectares47 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km02
Sights concentration. Marrakech leads by 1 points.1
Cape TownMarrakech
Score4546
Notable places within 2 km5155
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Marrakech leads by 1 points.1
Cape TownMarrakech
Score8586
Price level global40.539.8
Daily budget
Year-round weather. Cape Town leads by 5 points.5
Cape TownMarrakech
Score8681
Monthly daytime high18 °C to 27.5 °C19.1 °C to 37.6 °C
Monthly rainfall10 mm to 97 mm1 mm to 36 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
Marrakech
19
21
24
26
30
34
38
37
33
29
23
20
Sea temperature, °C
Cape Town
18
18
17
16
15
15
15
15
15
15
16
17
Marrakech
No coastline within reach
Rainfall, mm
Cape Town
10
11
13
42
65
97
89
76
47
32
27
13
Marrakech
26
27
36
28
9
3
1
3
14
19
29
25
Daylight, hours per day
Cape Town
14
13
12
11
10
10
10
11
12
13
14
14
Marrakech
10
11
12
13
14
14
14
13
12
11
11
10
Sunshine, hours per day
Cape Town
12
10
9
8
6
6
6
7
8
9
10
11
Marrakech
8
8
8
9
10
11
11
10
9
8
8
7

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). Marrakech: 1991-2020 normals, Marrakech (5.1 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromCape TownMarrakech
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
12 h 5 m
€634-815
CPT · 18 km
3 h 20 m
€140-172
RAK · 6 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
11 h 40 m
€742-801
2 stops
CPT · 18 km
3 h 10 m
€85-123
RAK · 6 km
FrankfurtFRA, HHN
11 h 45 m
€632-724
1 stop
CPT · 18 km
3 h 35 m
€144-224
1 stop
RAK · 6 km
AmsterdamAMS
12 h 5 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km
3 h 40 m
€201-233
1 stop
RAK · 6 km
AtlantaATL, PDK
16 h 5 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km
8 h 55 m
no fares
RAK · 6 km
ZurichZRH
11 h 25 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km
3 h 20 m
no fares
RAK · 6 km
MunichMUC
11 h 30 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km
3 h 35 m
no fares
RAK · 6 km
IstanbulIST, SAW
10 h 35 m
€717-799
1 stop
CPT · 18 km
4 h 40 m
no fares
RAK · 6 km
DohaDOH
9 h 25 m
€850-932
2 stops
CPT · 18 km
7 h 30 m
no fares
RAK · 6 km
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
15 h 25 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km
7 h 35 m
no fares
RAK · 6 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 TownMarrakech
Official languageEnglish, Zulu, Xhosa, Afrikaans, Venda, Northern Sotho, Swazi, Tswana, Tsonga, Sesotho, Southern Ndebele, South African Sign LanguageArabic, Standard Moroccan Tamazight
CurrencyRand (ZAR)Moroccan Dirham (MAD)
SocketsCMN230 V, 50 HzCE50 Hz
Driving sideLeftRight
Time zoneUTC+2UTC+1
Emergency number112Police 19/112, ambulance 15, fire 15
Elevation5 m465 m
Main airportCape Town International Airport (CPT)18 km from centre44 non-stop destinationsMarrakesh Menara Airport (RAK)6 km from centre118 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year12 days10 days

By the numbers

MeasureCape TownMarrakech
City population3,776,3131,002,697
People per km²1,5384,360
Museums within 10 km2214
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km31
Distinct cuisines in the centre6556
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 Marrakech 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.