VacationSelector

Cape Town or Nice?

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, 1 point apart

Cape Town
57
match

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

Nice
56
match

Wins on nature & day trips and beaches & swimming 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 TownNice
Beaches & swimming. Nice leads by 13 points.13
Cape TownNice
Score6073
Swim season months04
Beaches 10 km2970
Coast distance1 km1 km
Water distance1 km1 km
Places to eat. Nice leads by 2 points.2
Cape TownNice
Score6769
Restaurants within 2 km of centre6501,231
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km4228
Museums & heritage. Cape Town leads by 8 points.8
Cape TownNice
Score5446
Museums within 10 km2527
Museums within 2 km of centre2014
Share of museums within 2 km %8052
Unesco sites within 50 km32
Nightlife. Cape Town leads by 3 points.3
Cape TownNice
Score4744
Drinking venues within 4 km483428
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre389388
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %8191
Nightclubs within 4 km4726
Nature & day trips. Nice leads by 21 points.21
Cape TownNice
Score3657
Protected land share 50 km %624
Landscape blanket share 50 km %020
Land share of disc %4262
Park area within 2 km27 hectares56 hectares
Good for families. Cape Town leads by 6 points.6
Cape TownNice
Score3630
Tourist attractions within 2 km194
Park area within 2 km27 hectares56 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km03
Sights concentration. Nice leads by 2 points.2
Cape TownNice
Score4547
Notable places within 2 km5160
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Cape Town leads by 23 points.23
Cape TownNice
Score8562
Price level global40.573.7
Daily budget€160
Year-round weather. Cape Town leads by 12 points.12
Cape TownNice
Score8674
Monthly daytime high18 °C to 27.5 °C13.3 °C to 27.9 °C
Monthly rainfall10 mm to 97 mm13 mm to 138 mm
Dry months63
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
Nice
13
14
15
17
21
25
28
28
25
21
17
14
Sea temperature, °C
Cape Town
18
18
17
16
15
15
15
15
15
15
16
17
Nice
14
13
14
15
18
21
24
25
22
20
17
15
Rainfall, mm
Cape Town
10
11
13
42
65
97
89
76
47
32
27
13
Nice
74
53
51
69
42
34
13
18
84
124
138
91
Daylight, hours per day
Cape Town
14
13
12
11
10
10
10
11
12
13
14
14
Nice
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
Nice
5
6
7
7
9
10
11
11
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). Nice: 1991-2020 normals, Nice (8 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromCape TownNice
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
11 h 40 m
€742-801
2 stops
CPT · 18 km
1 h 30 m
€78-111
NCE · 6 km
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
12 h 5 m
€634-815
CPT · 18 km
1 h 55 m
€76-223
NCE · 6 km
AmsterdamAMS
12 h 5 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km
1 h 50 m
€170-248
NCE · 6 km
FrankfurtFRA, HHN
11 h 45 m
€632-724
1 stop
CPT · 18 km
1 h 30 m
€164-246
1 stop
NCE · 6 km
MunichMUC
11 h 30 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km
1 h 25 m
€198-243
1 stop
NCE · 6 km
DubaiDXB, DWC
9 h 40 m
€611-615
1 stop
CPT · 18 km
6 h 20 m
€375-433
NCE · 6 km
ZurichZRH
11 h 25 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km
1 h 10 m
€193-242
1 stop
NCE · 6 km
IstanbulIST, SAW
10 h 35 m
€717-799
1 stop
CPT · 18 km
2 h 45 m
€202-329
NCE · 6 km
DohaDOH
9 h 25 m
€850-932
2 stops
CPT · 18 km
5 h 55 m
no fares
NCE · 6 km
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
15 h 25 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km
8 h 10 m
€666-799
1 stop
NCE · 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 TownNice
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 destinationsNice-Côte d'Azur Airport (NCE)6 km from centre129 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year12 days11 days

By the numbers

MeasureCape TownNice
City population3,776,313357,737
People per km²1,5384,975
Museums within 10 km2216
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km32
Distinct cuisines in the centre6565
Swim season, months above 21 °CNone4 months

Where else could you go?

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