VacationSelector

Cape Town or Montpellier?

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 museums & heritage with your weighting.

Montpellier
47
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 TownMontpellier
Beaches & swimming. Cape Town leads by 28 points.28
Cape TownMontpellier
Score6032
Swim season months02
Beaches 10 km298
Coast distance1 km9 km
Water distance1 km9 km
Places to eat. Cape Town leads by 2 points.2
Cape TownMontpellier
Score6765
Restaurants within 2 km of centre650737
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km4234
Museums & heritage. Cape Town leads by 28 points.28
Cape TownMontpellier
Score5426
Museums within 10 km2514
Museums within 2 km of centre203
Share of museums within 2 km %8021
Unesco sites within 50 km32
Nightlife. Cape Town leads by 9 points.9
Cape TownMontpellier
Score4738
Drinking venues within 4 km483318
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre389265
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %8183
Nightclubs within 4 km4725
Nature & day trips. Montpellier leads by 7 points.7
Cape TownMontpellier
Score3643
Protected land share 50 km %615
Landscape blanket share 50 km %010
Land share of disc %4270
Park area within 2 km27 hectares55 hectares
Good for families. Montpellier leads by 8 points.8
Cape TownMontpellier
Score3644
Tourist attractions within 2 km198
Park area within 2 km27 hectares55 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km07
Sights concentration. Cape Town leads by 7 points.7
Cape TownMontpellier
Score4538
Notable places within 2 km5135
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Cape Town leads by 23 points.23
Cape TownMontpellier
Score8562
Price level global40.573.7
Daily budget—€160
Year-round weather. Cape Town leads by 12 points.12
Cape TownMontpellier
Score8674
Monthly daytime high18 °C to 27.5 °C12 °C to 29.6 °C
Monthly rainfall10 mm to 97 mm17 mm to 93 mm
Dry months65
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
Montpellier
12
13
16
19
23
27
30
29
25
21
16
13
Sea temperature, °C
Cape Town
18
18
17
16
15
15
15
15
15
15
16
17
Montpellier
12
12
12
14
16
19
21
22
20
18
16
14
Rainfall, mm
Cape Town
10
11
13
42
65
97
89
76
47
32
27
13
Montpellier
56
35
39
56
46
33
17
36
88
93
78
59
Daylight, hours per day
Cape Town
14
13
12
11
10
10
10
11
12
13
14
14
Montpellier
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
Montpellier
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
10
8
6
5
5

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). Montpellier: 1991-2020 normals, Montpellier (7.8 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromCape TownMontpellier
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
11 h 40 m
€742-801
2 stops
CPT · 18 km
1 h 25 m
no fares
MPL · 8 km
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
12 h 5 m
€634-815
CPT · 18 km
1 h 45 m
no fares
MPL · 8 km
FrankfurtFRA, HHN
11 h 45 m
€632-724
1 stop
CPT · 18 km
1 h 35 m
no fares
MRS · 109 km
MunichMUC
11 h 30 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km
1 h 35 m
no fares
MRS · 109 km
AmsterdamAMS
12 h 5 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km
1 h 50 m
no fares
MPL · 8 km
IstanbulIST, SAW
10 h 35 m
€717-799
1 stop
CPT · 18 km
3 h 5 m
no fares
MPL · 8 km
Addis AbabaADD
6 h 50 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km
6 h 35 m
no fares
MRS · 109 km
MauritiusMRU
5 h 30 m
€576-634
1 stop
CPT · 18 km
11 h 10 m
no fares
MRS · 109 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 TownMontpellier
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 m7 m
Main airportCape Town International Airport (CPT)18 km from centre44 non-stop destinationsMontpellier-Méditerranée Airport (MPL)8 km from centre36 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year12 days11 days

By the numbers

MeasureCape TownMontpellier
City population3,776,313310,240
People per km²1,5385,452
Museums within 10 km2214
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km32
Distinct cuisines in the centre6565
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 Montpellier 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.