VacationSelector

Cape Town or Marseille?

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

Your match

Too close to call, level with your weighting

Cape Town
57
match

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

Marseille
57
match

Wins on sights concentration and places to eat 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 TownMarseille
Beaches & swimming. Marseille leads by 7 points.7
Cape TownMarseille
Score6067
Swim season months02
Beaches 10 km2964
Coast distance1 km0 km
Water distance1 km0 km
Places to eat. Marseille leads by 8 points.8
Cape TownMarseille
Score6775
Restaurants within 2 km of centre6501,320
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km4239
Museums & heritage. Cape Town leads by 4 points.4
Cape TownMarseille
Score5450
Museums within 10 km2533
Museums within 2 km of centre2023
Share of museums within 2 km %8070
Unesco sites within 50 km31
Nightlife. Marseille leads by 1 points.1
Cape TownMarseille
Score4748
Drinking venues within 4 km483544
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre389454
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %8183
Nightclubs within 4 km4730
Nature & day trips. Marseille leads by 1 points.1
Cape TownMarseille
Score3637
Protected land share 50 km %615
Landscape blanket share 50 km %013
Land share of disc %4256
Park area within 2 km27 hectares25 hectares
Good for families. Marseille leads by 8 points.8
Cape TownMarseille
Score3644
Tourist attractions within 2 km1917
Park area within 2 km27 hectares25 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km04
Sights concentration. Marseille leads by 13 points.13
Cape TownMarseille
Score4558
Notable places within 2 km51111
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Cape Town leads by 23 points.23
Cape TownMarseille
Score8562
Price level global40.573.7
Daily budget—€160
Year-round weather. Cape Town leads by 11 points.11
Cape TownMarseille
Score8675
Monthly daytime high18 °C to 27.5 °C11.8 °C to 30.7 °C
Monthly rainfall10 mm to 97 mm11 mm to 82 mm
Dry months66
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
Marseille
12
13
16
19
24
28
31
30
26
21
16
12
Sea temperature, °C
Cape Town
18
18
17
16
15
15
15
15
15
15
16
17
Marseille
13
13
13
14
16
19
21
22
21
19
17
15
Rainfall, mm
Cape Town
10
11
13
42
65
97
89
76
47
32
27
13
Marseille
47
30
29
51
38
28
11
26
82
72
76
41
Daylight, hours per day
Cape Town
14
13
12
11
10
10
10
11
12
13
14
14
Marseille
9
11
12
13
15
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
Marseille
5
6
8
8
10
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). Marseille: 1991-2020 normals, Marseille / Marignane (20.6 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromCape TownMarseille
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
11 h 40 m
€742-801
2 stops
CPT · 18 km
1 h 25 m
€110-119
MRS · 21 km
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
12 h 5 m
€634-815
CPT · 18 km
1 h 50 m
€65-134
1 stop
MRS · 21 km
IstanbulIST, SAW
10 h 35 m
€717-799
1 stop
CPT · 18 km
2 h 55 m
€219-245
1 stop
MRS · 21 km
FrankfurtFRA, HHN
11 h 45 m
€632-724
1 stop
CPT · 18 km
1 h 35 m
no fares
MRS · 21 km
AmsterdamAMS
12 h 5 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km
1 h 50 m
no fares
MRS · 21 km
MunichMUC
11 h 30 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km
1 h 35 m
no fares
MRS · 21 km
Addis AbabaADD
6 h 50 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km
6 h 35 m
no fares
MRS · 21 km
MauritiusMRU
5 h 30 m
€576-634
1 stop
CPT · 18 km
11 h 10 m
no fares
MRS · 21 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 TownMarseille
Official languageEnglish, Zulu, Xhosa, Afrikaans, Venda, Northern Sotho, Swazi, Tswana, Tsonga, Sesotho, Southern Ndebele, South African Sign LanguageFrench
CurrencyRand (ZAR)Euro (EUR)
SocketsCMN230 V, 50 HzCE230 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideLeftRight
Time zoneUTC+2UTC+1, UTC+2 in summer
Emergency number112112
Elevation5 m0 m
Main airportCape Town International Airport (CPT)18 km from centre44 non-stop destinationsMarseille Provence Airport (MRS)21 km from centre125 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year12 days11 days

By the numbers

MeasureCape TownMarseille
City population3,776,313886,040
People per km²1,5383,683
Museums within 10 km2227
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km31
Distinct cuisines in the centre6593
Swim season, months above 21 °CNone2 months

Where else could you go?

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