VacationSelector

Cape Town or Pisa?

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 places to eat with your weighting.

Pisa
45
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 TownPisa
Beaches & swimming. Cape Town leads by 39 points.39
Cape TownPisa
Score6021
Swim season months04
Beaches 10 km291
Coast distance1 km10 km
Water distance1 km10 km
Places to eat. Cape Town leads by 33 points.33
Cape TownPisa
Score6734
Restaurants within 2 km of centre650379
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km429
Museums & heritage. Pisa leads by 1 points.1
Cape TownPisa
Score5455
Museums within 10 km2527
Museums within 2 km of centre2022
Share of museums within 2 km %8081
Unesco sites within 50 km33
Nightlife. Cape Town leads by 19 points.19
Cape TownPisa
Score4728
Drinking venues within 4 km483232
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre389203
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %8188
Nightclubs within 4 km473
Nature & day trips. Pisa leads by 3 points.3
Cape TownPisa
Score3639
Protected land share 50 km %69
Landscape blanket share 50 km %00
Land share of disc %4265
Park area within 2 km27 hectares40 hectares
Good for families. Pisa leads by 11 points.11
Cape TownPisa
Score3647
Tourist attractions within 2 km1920
Park area within 2 km27 hectares40 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km02
Sights concentration. Pisa leads by 2 points.2
Cape TownPisa
Score4547
Notable places within 2 km5158
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Cape Town leads by 17 points.17
Cape TownPisa
Score8568
Price level global40.564.9
Daily budget—€155
Year-round weather. Cape Town leads by 16 points.16
Cape TownPisa
Score8670
Monthly daytime high18 °C to 27.5 °C11.4 °C to 30.3 °C
Monthly rainfall10 mm to 97 mm32 mm to 132 mm
Dry months62
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
Pisa
11
13
16
18
23
27
30
30
26
21
16
12
Sea temperature, °C
Cape Town
18
18
17
16
15
15
15
15
15
15
16
17
Pisa
14
13
14
15
18
22
24
25
23
20
18
16
Rainfall, mm
Cape Town
10
11
13
42
65
97
89
76
47
32
27
13
Pisa
68
58
59
65
63
41
32
35
102
125
132
95
Daylight, hours per day
Cape Town
14
13
12
11
10
10
10
11
12
13
14
14
Pisa
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
Pisa
4
4
6
6
8
9
11
10
7
5
4
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). Pisa: 1991-2020 normals, Pisa / S. Giusto (3.9 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromCape TownPisa
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
12 h 5 m
€634-815
CPT · 18 km
2 h 5 m
€48-62
PSA · 4 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
11 h 40 m
€742-801
2 stops
CPT · 18 km
1 h 40 m
no fares
PSA · 4 km
FrankfurtFRA, HHN
11 h 45 m
€632-724
1 stop
CPT · 18 km
1 h 30 m
no fares
PSA · 4 km
AmsterdamAMS
12 h 5 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km
1 h 55 m
€210-262
1 stop
PSA · 4 km
ZurichZRH
11 h 25 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km
1 h 10 m
no fares
FLR · 65 km
MunichMUC
11 h 30 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km
1 h 15 m
no fares
FLR · 65 km
IstanbulIST, SAW
10 h 35 m
€717-799
1 stop
CPT · 18 km
2 h 25 m
€154-191
1 stop
BLQ · 115 km
DubaiDXB, DWC
9 h 40 m
€611-615
1 stop
CPT · 18 km
5 h 55 m
no fares
BLQ · 115 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 TownPisa
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 m4 m
Main airportCape Town International Airport (CPT)18 km from centre44 non-stop destinationsPisa International Airport (PSA)4 km from centre81 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year12 days13 days

By the numbers

MeasureCape TownPisa
City population3,776,31388,737
People per km²1,538479
Museums within 10 km2227
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km33
Distinct cuisines in the centre6529
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 Pisa 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.