VacationSelector

Cape Town or Plovdiv?

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.

Plovdiv
44
match

Wins on value for money 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 TownPlovdiv
Beaches & swimming. Cape Town leads by 60 points.60
Cape TownPlovdiv
Score600
Swim season months00
Beaches 10 km291
Coast distance1 km130 km
Water distance1 km
Places to eat. Cape Town leads by 21 points.21
Cape TownPlovdiv
Score6746
Restaurants within 2 km of centre650369
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km4219
Museums & heritage. Cape Town leads by 16 points.16
Cape TownPlovdiv
Score5438
Museums within 10 km2526
Museums within 2 km of centre2026
Share of museums within 2 km %80100
Unesco sites within 50 km30
Nightlife. Cape Town leads by 5 points.5
Cape TownPlovdiv
Score4742
Drinking venues within 4 km483392
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre389285
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %8173
Nightclubs within 4 km4726
Nature & day trips. Plovdiv leads by 1 points.1
Cape TownPlovdiv
Score3637
Protected land share 50 km %65
Landscape blanket share 50 km %00
Land share of disc %42100
Park area within 2 km27 hectares125 hectares
Good for families. Cape Town leads by 5 points.5
Cape TownPlovdiv
Score3631
Tourist attractions within 2 km195
Park area within 2 km27 hectares125 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km00
Sights concentration. Cape Town leads by 4 points.4
Cape TownPlovdiv
Score4541
Notable places within 2 km5141
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Plovdiv leads by 14 points.14
Cape TownPlovdiv
Score8599
Price level global40.521.4
Daily budget€77
Year-round weather. Cape Town leads by 21 points.21
Cape TownPlovdiv
Score8665
Monthly daytime high18 °C to 27.5 °C5.4 °C to 31.1 °C
Monthly rainfall10 mm to 97 mm25 mm to 81 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
Plovdiv
5
9
14
19
24
28
31
31
26
19
13
7
Sea temperature, °C
Cape Town
18
18
17
16
15
15
15
15
15
15
16
17
Plovdiv
No coastline within reach
Rainfall, mm
Cape Town
10
11
13
42
65
97
89
76
47
32
27
13
Plovdiv
65
63
61
53
67
62
40
25
48
66
59
81
Daylight, hours per day
Cape Town
14
13
12
11
10
10
10
11
12
13
14
14
Plovdiv
10
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
Plovdiv
3
4
5
6
8
9
10
10
7
5
3
2

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). Plovdiv: 1997-2020 (sunshine 1991-2020, rainfall 1991-2020) normals, Plovdiv (1.2 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromCape TownPlovdiv
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
12 h 5 m
€634-815
CPT · 18 km
3 h 5 m
€70-85
1 stop
SOF · 125 km
FrankfurtFRA, HHN
11 h 45 m
€632-724
1 stop
CPT · 18 km
2 h 20 m
€130-210
1 stop
SOF · 125 km
MunichMUC
11 h 30 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km
2 h 0 m
no fares
SOF · 125 km
IstanbulIST, SAW
10 h 35 m
€717-799
1 stop
CPT · 18 km
1 h 15 m
€116-123
SOF · 125 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
11 h 40 m
€742-801
2 stops
CPT · 18 km
2 h 45 m
€99-135
1 stop
SOF · 125 km
DubaiDXB, DWC
9 h 40 m
€611-615
1 stop
CPT · 18 km
4 h 45 m
€298-357
1 stop
SOF · 125 km
AmsterdamAMS
12 h 5 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km
2 h 45 m
no fares
SOF · 125 km
DohaDOH
9 h 25 m
€850-932
2 stops
CPT · 18 km
4 h 25 m
no fares
SOF · 125 km
ZurichZRH
11 h 25 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km
2 h 10 m
no fares
SOF · 125 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 TownPlovdiv
Official languageEnglish, Zulu, Xhosa, Afrikaans, Venda, Northern Sotho, Swazi, Tswana, Tsonga, Sesotho, Southern Ndebele, South African Sign LanguageBulgarian
CurrencyRand (ZAR)Euro (EUR)
SocketsCMN230 V, 50 HzCF230 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideLeftRight
Time zoneUTC+2UTC+2, UTC+3 in summer
Emergency number112112
Elevation5 m172 m
Main airportCape Town International Airport (CPT)18 km from centre44 non-stop destinationsPlovdiv International Airport (PDV)12 km from centre8 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year12 days15 days

By the numbers

MeasureCape TownPlovdiv
City population3,776,313333,994
People per km²1,5383,274
Museums within 10 km2218
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km30
Distinct cuisines in the centre6536
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 Plovdiv 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.