VacationSelector

Cape Town or Palermo?

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, 2 points apart

Cape Town
57
match

Wins on places to eat and value for money with your weighting.

Palermo
55
match

Wins on sights concentration 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 TownPalermo
Beaches & swimming. Palermo leads by 7 points.7
Cape TownPalermo
Score6067
Swim season months05
Beaches 10 km2913
Coast distance1 km1 km
Water distance1 km1 km
Places to eat. Cape Town leads by 17 points.17
Cape TownPalermo
Score6750
Restaurants within 2 km of centre650807
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km4213
Museums & heritage. Cape Town leads by 4 points.4
Cape TownPalermo
Score5450
Museums within 10 km2532
Museums within 2 km of centre2026
Share of museums within 2 km %8081
Unesco sites within 50 km31
Nightlife. Palermo leads by 6 points.6
Cape TownPalermo
Score4753
Drinking venues within 4 km483799
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre389515
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %8164
Nightclubs within 4 km4716
Nature & day trips. Cape Town and Palermo are level on 36.
Cape TownPalermo
Score3636
Protected land share 50 km %64
Landscape blanket share 50 km %00
Land share of disc %4245
Park area within 2 km27 hectares63 hectares
Good for families. Palermo leads by 5 points.5
Cape TownPalermo
Score3641
Tourist attractions within 2 km1916
Park area within 2 km27 hectares63 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km00
Sights concentration. Palermo leads by 12 points.12
Cape TownPalermo
Score4557
Notable places within 2 km51104
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Cape Town leads by 17 points.17
Cape TownPalermo
Score8568
Price level global40.564.9
Daily budget—€155
Year-round weather. Cape Town leads by 9 points.9
Cape TownPalermo
Score8677
Monthly daytime high18 °C to 27.5 °C12.6 °C to 27.8 °C
Monthly rainfall10 mm to 97 mm4 mm to 71 mm
Dry months67
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
Palermo
13
13
14
16
20
24
28
28
25
21
17
14
Sea temperature, °C
Cape Town
18
18
17
16
15
15
15
15
15
15
16
17
Palermo
15
14
15
16
19
22
26
27
25
23
20
17
Rainfall, mm
Cape Town
10
11
13
42
65
97
89
76
47
32
27
13
Palermo
48
45
35
35
18
9
4
11
37
67
71
69
Daylight, hours per day
Cape Town
14
13
12
11
10
10
10
11
12
13
14
14
Palermo
10
11
12
13
14
15
15
14
13
11
10
10
Sunshine, hours per day
Cape Town
12
10
9
8
6
6
6
7
8
9
10
11
Palermo
4
5
6
7
9
10
11
10
8
7
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). Palermo: 1961-1990 normals, Ustica (66.8 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromCape TownPalermo
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
12 h 5 m
€634-815
CPT · 18 km
2 h 50 m
no fares
PMO · 25 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
11 h 40 m
€742-801
2 stops
CPT · 18 km
2 h 25 m
€101-135
PMO · 25 km
FrankfurtFRA, HHN
11 h 45 m
€632-724
1 stop
CPT · 18 km
2 h 15 m
€101-154
1 stop
PMO · 25 km
IstanbulIST, SAW
10 h 35 m
€717-799
1 stop
CPT · 18 km
2 h 15 m
€183-194
PMO · 25 km
ZurichZRH
11 h 25 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km
1 h 55 m
€161-283
1 stop
PMO · 25 km
MunichMUC
11 h 30 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km
2 h 0 m
€175-215
1 stop
PMO · 25 km
AmsterdamAMS
12 h 5 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km
2 h 40 m
no fares
PMO · 25 km
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
15 h 25 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km
9 h 5 m
no fares
PMO · 25 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 TownPalermo
Official languageEnglish, Zulu, Xhosa, Afrikaans, Venda, Northern Sotho, Swazi, Tswana, Tsonga, Sesotho, Southern Ndebele, South African Sign LanguageItalian
CurrencyRand (ZAR)Euro (EUR)
SocketsCMN230 V, 50 HzCFL230 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideLeftRight
Time zoneUTC+2UTC+1, UTC+2 in summer
Emergency number112112
Elevation5 m14 m
Main airportCape Town International Airport (CPT)18 km from centre44 non-stop destinationsFalcone–Borsellino Airport (PMO)25 km from centre103 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year12 days13 days

By the numbers

MeasureCape TownPalermo
City population3,776,313630,167
People per km²1,5383,924
Museums within 10 km2242
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km31
Distinct cuisines in the centre6533
Swim season, months above 21 °CNone5 months

Where else could you go?

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