VacationSelector

Cape Town or Montreal?

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 year-round weather with your weighting.

Montreal
47
match

Wins on nightlife and good for families 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 TownMontreal
Beaches & swimming. Cape Town leads by 60 points.60
Cape TownMontreal
Score600
Swim season months00
Beaches 10 km297
Coast distance1 km276 km
Water distance1 km—
Places to eat. Montreal leads by 7 points.7
Cape TownMontreal
Score6774
Restaurants within 2 km of centre6501,016
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km4249
Museums & heritage. Cape Town leads by 17 points.17
Cape TownMontreal
Score5437
Museums within 10 km2539
Museums within 2 km of centre2019
Share of museums within 2 km %8049
Unesco sites within 50 km30
Nightlife. Montreal leads by 15 points.15
Cape TownMontreal
Score4762
Drinking venues within 4 km4831,012
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre389493
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %8149
Nightclubs within 4 km4774
Nature & day trips. Cape Town and Montreal are level on 36.
Cape TownMontreal
Score3636
Protected land share 50 km %62
Landscape blanket share 50 km %00
Land share of disc %42100
Park area within 2 km27 hectares189 hectares
Good for families. Montreal leads by 14 points.14
Cape TownMontreal
Score3650
Tourist attractions within 2 km1911
Park area within 2 km27 hectares189 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km01
Sights concentration. Montreal leads by 11 points.11
Cape TownMontreal
Score4556
Notable places within 2 km5198
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Cape Town leads by 31 points.31
Cape TownMontreal
Score8554
Price level global40.584
Daily budget——
Year-round weather. Cape Town leads by 36 points.36
Cape TownMontreal
Score8650
Monthly daytime high18 °C to 27.5 °C-3.5 °C to 26.5 °C
Monthly rainfall10 mm to 97 mm69 mm to 121 mm
Dry months60
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
Montreal
-3
-3
3
11
19
24
27
26
22
13
6
-1
Sea temperature, °C
Cape Town
18
18
17
16
15
15
15
15
15
15
16
17
Montreal
No coastline within reach
Rainfall, mm
Cape Town
10
11
13
42
65
97
89
76
47
32
27
13
Montreal
84
69
89
121
89
107
98
109
88
100
85
94
Daylight, hours per day
Cape Town
14
13
12
11
10
10
10
11
12
13
14
14
Montreal
9
10
12
14
15
16
15
14
13
11
10
9
Sunshine, hours per day
Cape Town
12
10
9
8
6
6
6
7
8
9
10
11
Montreal
3
4
6
6
8
8
9
8
7
4
3
3

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). Montreal: 1991-2020 normals, Montreal McTavish (3.2 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromCape TownMontreal
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
15 h 25 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km
1 h 20 m
€231-372
1 stop
YUL · 16 km
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
12 h 5 m
€634-815
CPT · 18 km
6 h 50 m
€447-599
1 stop
YUL · 16 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
11 h 40 m
€742-801
2 stops
CPT · 18 km
7 h 10 m
€308-372
YUL · 16 km
FrankfurtFRA, HHN
11 h 45 m
€632-724
1 stop
CPT · 18 km
7 h 35 m
€591-764
2 stops
YUL · 16 km
AtlantaATL, PDK
16 h 5 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km
2 h 35 m
no fares
YUL · 16 km
WashingtonIAD, DCA
15 h 40 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km
1 h 35 m
no fares
YUL · 16 km
AmsterdamAMS
12 h 5 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km
7 h 10 m
no fares
YUL · 16 km
Sao PauloGRU, VCP, CGH, RTE
8 h 10 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km
10 h 15 m
no fares
YUL · 16 km
ZurichZRH
11 h 25 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km
7 h 45 m
no fares
YUL · 16 km
MunichMUC
11 h 30 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km
7 h 55 m
no fares
YUL · 16 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 TownMontreal
Official languageEnglish, Zulu, Xhosa, Afrikaans, Venda, Northern Sotho, Swazi, Tswana, Tsonga, Sesotho, Southern Ndebele, South African Sign LanguageFrench, English
CurrencyRand (ZAR)Canadian Dollar (CAD)
SocketsCMN230 V, 50 HzAB120 V, 60 Hz
Driving sideLeftRight
Time zoneUTC+2UTC-5, UTC-4 in summer
Emergency number112911
Elevation5 m31 m
Main airportCape Town International Airport (CPT)18 km from centre44 non-stop destinationsMontreal / Pierre Elliott Trudeau International Airport (YUL)16 km from centre164 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year12 days10 days

By the numbers

MeasureCape TownMontreal
City population3,776,3131,895,211
People per km²1,5383,806
Museums within 10 km2237
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km30
Distinct cuisines in the centre6597
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 Montreal 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.