VacationSelector

Malaga or Mexico City?

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

Your match

Malaga
59
match

Wins on beaches & swimming and places to eat with your weighting.

Mexico City
✓ Best match
62
match

Wins on museums & heritage and nightlife 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.

MalagaMexico City
Beaches & swimming. Malaga leads by 66 points.66
MalagaMexico City
Score660
Swim season months30
Beaches 10 km214
Coast distance0 km247 km
Water distance0 km—
Places to eat. Malaga leads by 3 points.3
MalagaMexico City
Score6966
Restaurants within 2 km of centre1,0022,179
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km3415
Museums & heritage. Mexico City leads by 26 points.26
MalagaMexico City
Score5379
Museums within 10 km40138
Museums within 2 km of centre3565
Share of museums within 2 km %8847
Unesco sites within 50 km16
Nightlife. Mexico City leads by 24 points.24
MalagaMexico City
Score5478
Drinking venues within 4 km7152,156
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre486926
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %6843
Nightclubs within 4 km45198
Nature & day trips. Mexico City leads by 20 points.20
MalagaMexico City
Score4363
Protected land share 50 km %730
Landscape blanket share 50 km %00
Land share of disc %63100
Park area within 2 km85 hectares32 hectares
Good for families. Malaga leads by 3 points.3
MalagaMexico City
Score5350
Tourist attractions within 2 km3323
Park area within 2 km85 hectares32 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km04
Sights concentration. Mexico City leads by 17 points.17
MalagaMexico City
Score3754
Notable places within 2 km3388
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Mexico City leads by 5 points.5
MalagaMexico City
Score7176
Price level global60.854.2
Daily budget€122—
Year-round weather. Mexico City leads by 8 points.8
MalagaMexico City
Score8290
Monthly daytime high17.2 °C to 31.5 °C22.2 °C to 27.9 °C
Monthly rainfall0 mm to 88 mm3 mm to 186 mm
Dry months56
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
Malaga
17
18
20
22
25
29
31
32
28
24
20
18
Mexico City
22
25
26
28
27
26
25
25
24
23
23
22
Sea temperature, °C
Malaga
15
15
15
16
18
20
22
23
22
20
17
16
Mexico City
No coastline within reach
Rainfall, mm
Malaga
62
55
66
41
23
4
0
3
25
60
78
88
Mexico City
7
3
19
27
53
127
176
186
144
79
10
9
Daylight, hours per day
Malaga
10
11
12
13
14
15
14
14
13
11
10
10
Mexico City
11
12
12
13
13
13
13
13
12
12
11
11
Sunshine, hours per day
Malaga
6
6
7
8
10
11
12
11
8
7
6
5
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. Malaga: 1991-2020 normals, Malaga / Aeropuerto (8.2 km from centre). Mexico City: 1991-2020 normals, Mexico Central, D. F. (7.9 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromMalagaMexico City
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
2 h 40 m
€67-129
AGP · 9 km
11 h 10 m
no fares
MEX · 7 km
BarcelonaBCN
1 h 35 m
€73-109
AGP · 9 km
11 h 50 m
€883-934
2 stops
MEX · 7 km
AmsterdamAMS
2 h 55 m
€146-177
AGP · 9 km
11 h 30 m
no fares
MEX · 7 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
2 h 25 m
€92
AGP · 9 km
11 h 30 m
no fares
MEX · 7 km
MadridMAD
1 h 10 m
no fares
AGP · 9 km
11 h 20 m
no fares
MEX · 7 km
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
7 h 35 m
no fares
AGP · 9 km
4 h 40 m
€335-379
MEX · 7 km
RomeFCO, CIA
2 h 30 m
€59-73
AGP · 9 km
12 h 40 m
no fares
MEX · 7 km
FrankfurtFRA, HHN
2 h 50 m
€124-199
1 stop
AGP · 9 km
11 h 55 m
no fares
MEX · 7 km
IstanbulIST, SAW
4 h 5 m
€185-196
AGP · 9 km
14 h 5 m
no fares
MEX · 7 km
MontrealYUL, YHU, YMX
7 h 25 m
no fares
AGP · 9 km
5 h 0 m
no fares
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

MeasureMalagaMexico City
Official languageSpanishSpanish, Nahuatl, Yucatec Maya
CurrencyEuro (EUR)Mexican Peso (MXN)
SocketsCF230 V, 50 HzAB127 V, 60 Hz
Driving sideRightRight
Time zoneUTC+1, UTC+2 in summerUTC-6
Emergency number112911
Elevation18 m2,240 m
Main airportMálaga-Costa del Sol Airport (AGP)9 km from centre165 non-stop destinationsMexico City Benito Juárez International Airport (MEX)7 km from centre95 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year12 days9 days

By the numbers

MeasureMalagaMexico City
City population599,0639,209,944
People per km²1,5176,202
Museums within 10 km32108
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km16
Distinct cuisines in the centre6550
Swim season, months above 21 °C3 months–

Where else could you go?

Every comparison below shares a destination with this one, so you can follow Malaga 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). Tourism statistics from Eurostat, © European Union, reused under CC BY 4.0. Public holidays from Nager.Date (MIT). 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. Exchange rates via Frankfurter, based on European Central Bank reference rates. 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.