VacationSelector

Cardiff or Mexico City?

Two destinations compared on nine measures of openly sourced data. Weight what matters to you and the verdict follows.

Your match

Cardiff
48
match

Wins on beaches & swimming with your weighting.

Mexico City
✓ Best match
62
match

Wins on museums & heritage and year-round weather 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.

CardiffMexico City
Beaches & swimming. Cardiff leads by 46 points.46
CardiffMexico City
Score460
Swim season months00
Beaches 10 km84
Coast distance2 km247 km
Water distance2 km
Places to eat. Mexico City leads by 6 points.6
CardiffMexico City
Score6066
Restaurants within 2 km of centre5412,179
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km3215
Museums & heritage. Mexico City leads by 40 points.40
CardiffMexico City
Score3979
Museums within 10 km61138
Museums within 2 km of centre665
Share of museums within 2 km %1047
Unesco sites within 50 km16
Nightlife. Mexico City leads by 30 points.30
CardiffMexico City
Score4878
Drinking venues within 4 km5362,156
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre395926
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %7443
Nightclubs within 4 km35198
Nature & day trips. Mexico City leads by 13 points.13
CardiffMexico City
Score5063
Protected land share 50 km %1830
Landscape blanket share 50 km %150
Land share of disc %68100
Park area within 2 km88 hectares32 hectares
Good for families. Mexico City leads by 18 points.18
CardiffMexico City
Score3250
Tourist attractions within 2 km423
Park area within 2 km88 hectares32 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km24
Sights concentration. Mexico City leads by 9 points.9
CardiffMexico City
Score4554
Notable places within 2 km5188
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Mexico City leads by 22 points.22
CardiffMexico City
Score5476
Price level global84.954.2
Daily budget
Year-round weather. Mexico City leads by 36 points.36
CardiffMexico City
Score5490
Monthly daytime high7.7 °C to 20.2 °C22.2 °C to 27.9 °C
Monthly rainfall49 mm to 87 mm3 mm to 186 mm
Dry months06
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
Cardiff
8
8
10
13
16
18
20
20
18
14
11
9
Mexico City
22
25
26
28
27
26
25
25
24
23
23
22
Sea temperature, °C
Cardiff
8
7
8
9
12
15
17
18
17
15
12
9
Mexico City
No coastline within reach
Rainfall, mm
Cardiff
77
55
49
54
56
56
61
66
54
87
83
79
Mexico City
7
3
19
27
53
127
176
186
144
79
10
9
Daylight, hours per day
Cardiff
8
10
12
14
16
17
16
15
13
11
9
8
Mexico City
11
12
12
13
13
13
13
13
12
12
11
11
Sunshine, hours per day
Cardiff
2
3
4
6
7
7
7
6
5
4
2
2
Mexico City
8
8
9
8
8
6
6
6
5
6
7
7

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. Cardiff: 1991-2020 normals, Cardiff-Wales Airport (14.9 km from centre). Mexico City: 1991-2020 normals, Mexico Central, D. F. (7.9 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromCardiffMexico City
CancunCUN
9 h 55 m
no fares
BHX · 146 km
2 h 10 m
€123-162
MEX · 7 km
BarcelonaBCN
2 h 5 m
no fares
BRS · 34 km
11 h 50 m
€883-934
2 stops
MEX · 7 km
TorontoYYZ, YHM, YTZ
7 h 10 m
no fares
CWL · 15 km
4 h 30 m
€367-420
1 stop
MEX · 7 km
MadridMAD
2 h 5 m
no fares
BRS · 34 km
11 h 20 m
no fares
MEX · 7 km
AmsterdamAMS
1 h 20 m
no fares
CWL · 15 km
11 h 30 m
no fares
MEX · 7 km
DubaiDXB, DWC
7 h 15 m
no fares
BHX · 146 km
17 h 30 m
€1,075-1211
2 stops
MEX · 7 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 2026-08 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

MeasureCardiffMexico City
Official languageEnglishSpanish, Nahuatl, Yucatec Maya
CurrencyPound Sterling (GBP)Mexican Peso (MXN)
SocketsG230 V, 50 HzAB127 V, 60 Hz
Driving sideLeftRight
Time zoneUTC, UTC+1 in summerUTC-6
Emergency number112 or 999911
Elevation41 m2,240 m
Main airportCardiff International Airport (CWL)15 km from centre8 non-stop destinationsMexico City Benito Juárez International Airport (MEX)7 km from centre95 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year8 days9 days

By the numbers

MeasureCardiffMexico City
City population383,5369,209,944
People per km²2,7346,202
Museums within 10 km9108
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km16
Distinct cuisines in the centre5550
Swim season, months above 21 °CNone

Where else could you go?

Every comparison below shares a destination with this one, so you can follow Cardiff or Mexico City 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.