VacationSelector

Cape Town or Santiago de Compostela?

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 year-round weather with your weighting.

Santiago de Compostela
42
match

Wins on 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 TownSantiago de Compostela
Beaches & swimming. Cape Town leads by 60 points.60
Cape TownSantiago de Compostela
Score600
Swim season months00
Beaches 10 km290
Coast distance1 km26 km
Water distance1 km26 km
Places to eat. Cape Town leads by 19 points.19
Cape TownSantiago de Compostela
Score6748
Restaurants within 2 km of centre650336
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km4223
Museums & heritage. Cape Town leads by 10 points.10
Cape TownSantiago de Compostela
Score5444
Museums within 10 km2516
Museums within 2 km of centre2014
Share of museums within 2 km %8088
Unesco sites within 50 km32
Nightlife. Cape Town leads by 11 points.11
Cape TownSantiago de Compostela
Score4736
Drinking venues within 4 km483306
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre389268
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %8188
Nightclubs within 4 km4713
Nature & day trips. Santiago de Compostela leads by 10 points.10
Cape TownSantiago de Compostela
Score3646
Protected land share 50 km %611
Landscape blanket share 50 km %00
Land share of disc %4292
Park area within 2 km27 hectares109 hectares
Good for families. Cape Town leads by 9 points.9
Cape TownSantiago de Compostela
Score3627
Tourist attractions within 2 km192
Park area within 2 km27 hectares109 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km00
Sights concentration. Cape Town leads by 3 points.3
Cape TownSantiago de Compostela
Score4542
Notable places within 2 km5144
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Cape Town leads by 14 points.14
Cape TownSantiago de Compostela
Score8571
Price level global40.560.8
Daily budget€122
Year-round weather. Cape Town leads by 24 points.24
Cape TownSantiago de Compostela
Score8662
Monthly daytime high18 °C to 27.5 °C11.3 °C to 25 °C
Monthly rainfall10 mm to 97 mm41 mm to 223 mm
Dry months60
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
Santiago de Compostela
11
13
15
17
20
23
25
25
23
19
14
12
Sea temperature, °C
Cape Town
18
18
17
16
15
15
15
15
15
15
16
17
Santiago de Compostela
14
13
13
14
15
16
17
17
17
16
15
14
Rainfall, mm
Cape Town
10
11
13
42
65
97
89
76
47
32
27
13
Santiago de Compostela
217
149
153
136
116
61
41
61
91
208
223
222
Daylight, hours per day
Cape Town
14
13
12
11
10
10
10
11
12
13
14
14
Santiago de Compostela
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
Santiago de Compostela
3
4
5
6
7
7
8
8
6
4
3
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). Santiago de Compostela: 1991-2020 normals, Santiago / Labacolla (8.4 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromCape TownSantiago de Compostela
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
12 h 5 m
€634-815
CPT · 18 km
2 h 0 m
no fares
SCQ · 10 km
FrankfurtFRA, HHN
11 h 45 m
€632-724
1 stop
CPT · 18 km
2 h 25 m
no fares
SCQ · 10 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
11 h 40 m
€742-801
2 stops
CPT · 18 km
1 h 55 m
no fares
SCQ · 10 km
AmsterdamAMS
12 h 5 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km
2 h 20 m
no fares
SCQ · 10 km
ZurichZRH
11 h 25 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km
2 h 20 m
no fares
SCQ · 10 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 TownSantiago de Compostela
Official languageEnglish, Zulu, Xhosa, Afrikaans, Venda, Northern Sotho, Swazi, Tswana, Tsonga, Sesotho, Southern Ndebele, South African Sign LanguageSpanish
CurrencyRand (ZAR)Euro (EUR)
SocketsCMN230 V, 50 HzCF230 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideLeftRight
Time zoneUTC+2UTC+1, UTC+2 in summer
Emergency number112112
Elevation5 m260 m
Main airportCape Town International Airport (CPT)18 km from centre44 non-stop destinationsSantiago-Rosalía de Castro Airport (SCQ)10 km from centre27 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year12 days13 days

By the numbers

MeasureCape TownSantiago de Compostela
City population3,776,313100,965
People per km²1,538459
Museums within 10 km226
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km32
Distinct cuisines in the centre6538
Swim season, months above 21 °CNoneNone

Where else could you go?

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