VacationSelector

Cape Town or Mexico City?

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.

Mexico City
✓ Best match
62
match

Wins on nightlife 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 TownMexico City
Beaches & swimming. Cape Town leads by 60 points.60
Cape TownMexico City
Score600
Swim season months00
Beaches 10 km294
Coast distance1 km247 km
Water distance1 km—
Places to eat. Cape Town leads by 1 points.1
Cape TownMexico City
Score6766
Restaurants within 2 km of centre6502,179
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km4215
Museums & heritage. Mexico City leads by 25 points.25
Cape TownMexico City
Score5479
Museums within 10 km25138
Museums within 2 km of centre2065
Share of museums within 2 km %8047
Unesco sites within 50 km36
Nightlife. Mexico City leads by 31 points.31
Cape TownMexico City
Score4778
Drinking venues within 4 km4832,156
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre389926
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %8143
Nightclubs within 4 km47198
Nature & day trips. Mexico City leads by 27 points.27
Cape TownMexico City
Score3663
Protected land share 50 km %630
Landscape blanket share 50 km %00
Land share of disc %42100
Park area within 2 km27 hectares32 hectares
Good for families. Mexico City leads by 14 points.14
Cape TownMexico City
Score3650
Tourist attractions within 2 km1923
Park area within 2 km27 hectares32 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km04
Sights concentration. Mexico City leads by 9 points.9
Cape TownMexico City
Score4554
Notable places within 2 km5188
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Cape Town leads by 9 points.9
Cape TownMexico City
Score8576
Price level global40.554.2
Daily budget——
Year-round weather. Mexico City leads by 4 points.4
Cape TownMexico City
Score8690
Monthly daytime high18 °C to 27.5 °C22.2 °C to 27.9 °C
Monthly rainfall10 mm to 97 mm3 mm to 186 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
Mexico City
22
25
26
28
27
26
25
25
24
23
23
22
Sea temperature, °C
Cape Town
18
18
17
16
15
15
15
15
15
15
16
17
Mexico City
No coastline within reach
Rainfall, mm
Cape Town
10
11
13
42
65
97
89
76
47
32
27
13
Mexico City
7
3
19
27
53
127
176
186
144
79
10
9
Daylight, hours per day
Cape Town
14
13
12
11
10
10
10
11
12
13
14
14
Mexico City
11
12
12
13
13
13
13
13
12
12
11
11
Sunshine, hours per day
Cape Town
12
10
9
8
6
6
6
7
8
9
10
11
Mexico City
8
8
9
8
8
6
6
6
5
6
7
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). Mexico City: 1991-2020 normals, Mexico Central, D. F. (7.9 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromCape TownMexico City
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
15 h 25 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km
4 h 40 m
€335-379
MEX · 7 km
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
12 h 5 m
€634-815
CPT · 18 km
11 h 10 m
no fares
MEX · 7 km
FrankfurtFRA, HHN
11 h 45 m
€632-724
1 stop
CPT · 18 km
11 h 55 m
no fares
MEX · 7 km
DubaiDXB, DWC
9 h 40 m
€611-615
1 stop
CPT · 18 km
17 h 30 m
€1,075-1211
2 stops
MEX · 7 km
AtlantaATL, PDK
16 h 5 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km
3 h 10 m
no fares
MEX · 7 km
Sao PauloGRU, VCP, CGH, RTE
8 h 10 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km
9 h 25 m
no fares
MEX · 7 km
MunichMUC
11 h 30 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km
12 h 15 m
no fares
MEX · 7 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
11 h 40 m
€742-801
2 stops
CPT · 18 km
11 h 30 m
no fares
MEX · 7 km
AmsterdamAMS
12 h 5 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km
11 h 30 m
no fares
MEX · 7 km
IstanbulIST, SAW
10 h 35 m
€717-799
1 stop
CPT · 18 km
14 h 5 m
no fares
MEX · 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 TownMexico City
Official languageEnglish, Zulu, Xhosa, Afrikaans, Venda, Northern Sotho, Swazi, Tswana, Tsonga, Sesotho, Southern Ndebele, South African Sign LanguageSpanish, Nahuatl, Yucatec Maya
CurrencyRand (ZAR)Mexican Peso (MXN)
SocketsCMN230 V, 50 HzAB127 V, 60 Hz
Driving sideLeftRight
Time zoneUTC+2UTC-6
Emergency number112911
Elevation5 m2,240 m
Main airportCape Town International Airport (CPT)18 km from centre44 non-stop destinationsMexico City Benito Juárez International Airport (MEX)7 km from centre95 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year12 days9 days

By the numbers

MeasureCape TownMexico City
City population3,776,3139,209,944
People per km²1,5386,202
Museums within 10 km22108
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km36
Distinct cuisines in the centre6550
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 Mexico City 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.