VacationSelector

Cape Town or Sao Paulo?

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, 1 point apart

Cape Town
57
match

Wins on beaches & swimming and museums & heritage with your weighting.

Sao Paulo
56
match

Wins on nightlife and good for families 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 TownSao Paulo
Beaches & swimming. Cape Town leads by 60 points.60
Cape TownSao Paulo
Score600
Swim season months00
Beaches 10 km290
Coast distance1 km51 km
Water distance1 km
Places to eat. Sao Paulo leads by 6 points.6
Cape TownSao Paulo
Score6773
Restaurants within 2 km of centre6501,735
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km4227
Museums & heritage. Cape Town leads by 11 points.11
Cape TownSao Paulo
Score5443
Museums within 10 km2582
Museums within 2 km of centre2026
Share of museums within 2 km %8032
Unesco sites within 50 km30
Nightlife. Sao Paulo leads by 25 points.25
Cape TownSao Paulo
Score4772
Drinking venues within 4 km4831,747
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre389896
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %8151
Nightclubs within 4 km47118
Nature & day trips. Sao Paulo leads by 15 points.15
Cape TownSao Paulo
Score3651
Protected land share 50 km %626
Landscape blanket share 50 km %015
Land share of disc %4295
Park area within 2 km27 hectares52 hectares
Good for families. Sao Paulo leads by 19 points.19
Cape TownSao Paulo
Score3655
Tourist attractions within 2 km1938
Park area within 2 km27 hectares52 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km01
Sights concentration. Sao Paulo leads by 5 points.5
Cape TownSao Paulo
Score4550
Notable places within 2 km5168
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Cape Town leads by 4 points.4
Cape TownSao Paulo
Score8581
Price level global40.546.1
Daily budget
Year-round weather. Cape Town leads by 3 points.3
Cape TownSao Paulo
Score8683
Monthly daytime high18 °C to 27.5 °C22.8 °C to 29.2 °C
Monthly rainfall10 mm to 97 mm26 mm to 297 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
Sao Paulo
28
29
28
27
24
23
23
25
25
27
27
28
Sea temperature, °C
Cape Town
18
18
17
16
15
15
15
15
15
15
16
17
Sao Paulo
No coastline within reach
Rainfall, mm
Cape Town
10
11
13
42
65
97
89
76
47
32
27
13
Sao Paulo
297
259
206
89
64
55
53
26
82
128
146
234
Daylight, hours per day
Cape Town
14
13
12
11
10
10
10
11
12
13
14
14
Sao Paulo
13
13
12
12
11
11
11
11
12
13
13
14
Sunshine, hours per day
Cape Town
12
10
9
8
6
6
6
7
8
9
10
11
Sao Paulo
4
6
6
5
5
5
6
6
5
6
5
5

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). Sao Paulo: 1991-2020 normals, Sao Paulo (5.9 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromCape TownSao Paulo
JohannesburgJNB, HLA
2 h 10 m
€162-179
CPT · 18 km
9 h 25 m
€445-559
GRU · 21 km
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
12 h 5 m
€634-815
CPT · 18 km
11 h 50 m
no fares
GRU · 21 km
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
15 h 25 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km
9 h 40 m
€576-611
GRU · 21 km
FrankfurtFRA, HHN
11 h 45 m
€632-724
1 stop
CPT · 18 km
12 h 10 m
no fares
GRU · 21 km
AtlantaATL, PDK
16 h 5 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km
9 h 30 m
no fares
GRU · 21 km
ZurichZRH
11 h 25 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km
12 h 0 m
no fares
GRU · 21 km
MunichMUC
11 h 30 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km
12 h 15 m
no fares
GRU · 21 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
11 h 40 m
€742-801
2 stops
CPT · 18 km
11 h 45 m
no fares
GRU · 21 km
AmsterdamAMS
12 h 5 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km
12 h 10 m
no fares
GRU · 21 km
IstanbulIST, SAW
10 h 35 m
€717-799
1 stop
CPT · 18 km
13 h 5 m
no fares
GRU · 21 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 TownSao Paulo
Official languageEnglish, Zulu, Xhosa, Afrikaans, Venda, Northern Sotho, Swazi, Tswana, Tsonga, Sesotho, Southern Ndebele, South African Sign LanguagePortuguese
CurrencyRand (ZAR)Brazilian Real (BRL)
SocketsCMN230 V, 50 HzCN60 Hz
Driving sideLeftRight
Time zoneUTC+2UTC-3
Emergency number112Police 190, ambulance 192, fire 193
Elevation5 m760 m
Main airportCape Town International Airport (CPT)18 km from centre44 non-stop destinationsSão Paulo/Guarulhos–Governor André Franco Montoro International Airport (GRU)21 km from centre102 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year12 days15 days

By the numbers

MeasureCape TownSao Paulo
City population3,776,31311,451,999
People per km²1,5387,519
Museums within 10 km2290
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km30
Distinct cuisines in the centre6559
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 Sao Paulo 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. 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.