VacationSelector

Cape Town or Paris?

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.

Paris
✓ Best match
67
match

Wins on sights concentration and nightlife 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 TownParis
Beaches & swimming. Cape Town leads by 60 points.60
Cape TownParis
Score600
Swim season months00
Beaches 10 km292
Coast distance1 km149 km
Water distance1 km—
Places to eat. Paris leads by 23 points.23
Cape TownParis
Score6790
Restaurants within 2 km of centre6504,732
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km4233
Museums & heritage. Paris leads by 22 points.22
Cape TownParis
Score5476
Museums within 10 km25185
Museums within 2 km of centre2065
Share of museums within 2 km %8035
Unesco sites within 50 km34
Nightlife. Paris leads by 41 points.41
Cape TownParis
Score4788
Drinking venues within 4 km4833,796
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre3891,694
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %8145
Nightclubs within 4 km47201
Nature & day trips. Paris leads by 12 points.12
Cape TownParis
Score3648
Protected land share 50 km %628
Landscape blanket share 50 km %026
Land share of disc %42100
Park area within 2 km27 hectares82 hectares
Good for families. Paris leads by 39 points.39
Cape TownParis
Score3675
Tourist attractions within 2 km1989
Park area within 2 km27 hectares82 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km03
Sights concentration. Paris leads by 49 points.49
Cape TownParis
Score4594
Notable places within 2 km51865
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Cape Town leads by 23 points.23
Cape TownParis
Score8562
Price level global40.573.7
Daily budget—€160
Year-round weather. Cape Town leads by 20 points.20
Cape TownParis
Score8666
Monthly daytime high18 °C to 27.5 °C7.8 °C to 26 °C
Monthly rainfall10 mm to 97 mm38 mm to 75 mm
Dry months61
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
Paris
8
9
13
17
20
24
26
26
22
17
11
8
Sea temperature, °C
Cape Town
18
18
17
16
15
15
15
15
15
15
16
17
Paris
No coastline within reach
Rainfall, mm
Cape Town
10
11
13
42
65
97
89
76
47
32
27
13
Paris
45
38
41
45
75
51
58
54
51
55
54
62
Daylight, hours per day
Cape Town
14
13
12
11
10
10
10
11
12
13
14
14
Paris
9
10
12
14
15
16
16
14
13
11
9
8
Sunshine, hours per day
Cape Town
12
10
9
8
6
6
6
7
8
9
10
11
Paris
No sunshine record

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). Paris: 1991-2020 normals, Paris-Montsouris (4.6 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromCape TownParis
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
12 h 5 m
€634-815
CPT · 18 km
1 h 5 m
€63-103
CDG · 22 km
JohannesburgJNB, HLA
2 h 10 m
€162-179
CPT · 18 km
10 h 55 m
no fares
CDG · 22 km
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
15 h 25 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km
7 h 30 m
€579-648
1 stop
CDG · 22 km
FrankfurtFRA, HHN
11 h 45 m
€632-724
1 stop
CPT · 18 km
1 h 10 m
€122-134
CDG · 22 km
DubaiDXB, DWC
9 h 40 m
€611-615
1 stop
CPT · 18 km
6 h 50 m
€292-389
1 stop
CDG · 22 km
IstanbulIST, SAW
10 h 35 m
€717-799
1 stop
CPT · 18 km
3 h 15 m
€152-378
1 stop
CDG · 22 km
AmsterdamAMS
12 h 5 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km
1 h 10 m
€188-212
CDG · 22 km
AtlantaATL, PDK
16 h 5 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km
9 h 0 m
€555-767
1 stop
CDG · 22 km
Sao PauloGRU, VCP, CGH, RTE
8 h 10 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km
11 h 45 m
€806-1124
CDG · 22 km
SingaporeSIN, XSP
12 h 0 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km
13 h 15 m
no fares
CDG · 22 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 TownParis
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 m27 m
Main airportCape Town International Airport (CPT)18 km from centre44 non-stop destinationsCharles de Gaulle International Airport (CDG)22 km from centre277 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year12 days11 days

By the numbers

MeasureCape TownParis
City population3,776,3132,103,778
People per km²1,53819,960
Museums within 10 km22251
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km34
Distinct cuisines in the centre65169
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 Paris 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.