VacationSelector

Mexico City or Palermo?

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

Your match

Mexico City
✓ Best match
62
match

Wins on museums & heritage and nature & day trips with your weighting.

Palermo
55
match

Wins on beaches & swimming and sights concentration 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.

Mexico CityPalermo
Beaches & swimming. Palermo leads by 67 points.67
Mexico CityPalermo
Score067
Swim season months05
Beaches 10 km413
Coast distance247 km1 km
Water distance1 km
Places to eat. Mexico City leads by 16 points.16
Mexico CityPalermo
Score6650
Restaurants within 2 km of centre2,179807
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km1513
Museums & heritage. Mexico City leads by 29 points.29
Mexico CityPalermo
Score7950
Museums within 10 km13832
Museums within 2 km of centre6526
Share of museums within 2 km %4781
Unesco sites within 50 km61
Nightlife. Mexico City leads by 25 points.25
Mexico CityPalermo
Score7853
Drinking venues within 4 km2,156799
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre926515
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %4364
Nightclubs within 4 km19816
Nature & day trips. Mexico City leads by 27 points.27
Mexico CityPalermo
Score6336
Protected land share 50 km %304
Landscape blanket share 50 km %00
Land share of disc %10045
Park area within 2 km32 hectares63 hectares
Good for families. Mexico City leads by 9 points.9
Mexico CityPalermo
Score5041
Tourist attractions within 2 km2316
Park area within 2 km32 hectares63 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km40
Sights concentration. Palermo leads by 3 points.3
Mexico CityPalermo
Score5457
Notable places within 2 km88104
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Mexico City leads by 8 points.8
Mexico CityPalermo
Score7668
Price level global54.264.9
Daily budget€155
Year-round weather. Mexico City leads by 13 points.13
Mexico CityPalermo
Score9077
Monthly daytime high22.2 °C to 27.9 °C12.6 °C to 27.8 °C
Monthly rainfall3 mm to 186 mm4 mm to 71 mm
Dry months67
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
Mexico City
22
25
26
28
27
26
25
25
24
23
23
22
Palermo
13
13
14
16
20
24
28
28
25
21
17
14
Sea temperature, °C
Mexico City
No coastline within reach
Palermo
15
14
15
16
19
22
26
27
25
23
20
17
Rainfall, mm
Mexico City
7
3
19
27
53
127
176
186
144
79
10
9
Palermo
48
45
35
35
18
9
4
11
37
67
71
69
Daylight, hours per day
Mexico City
11
12
12
13
13
13
13
13
12
12
11
11
Palermo
10
11
12
13
14
15
15
14
13
11
10
10
Sunshine, hours per day
Mexico City
8
8
9
8
8
6
6
6
5
6
7
7
Palermo
4
5
6
7
9
10
11
10
8
7
5
4

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. Mexico City: 1991-2020 normals, Mexico Central, D. F. (7.9 km from centre). Palermo: 1961-1990 normals, Ustica (66.8 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromMexico CityPalermo
RomeFCO, CIA
12 h 40 m
no fares
MEX · 7 km
1 h 10 m
€40-52
PMO · 25 km
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
4 h 40 m
€335-379
MEX · 7 km
9 h 5 m
no fares
PMO · 25 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
11 h 30 m
no fares
MEX · 7 km
2 h 25 m
€101-135
PMO · 25 km
BarcelonaBCN
11 h 50 m
€883-934
2 stops
MEX · 7 km
1 h 50 m
€49-107
PMO · 25 km
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
11 h 10 m
no fares
MEX · 7 km
2 h 50 m
no fares
PMO · 25 km
IstanbulIST, SAW
14 h 5 m
no fares
MEX · 7 km
2 h 15 m
€183-194
PMO · 25 km
MunichMUC
12 h 15 m
no fares
MEX · 7 km
2 h 0 m
€175-215
1 stop
PMO · 25 km
FrankfurtFRA, HHN
11 h 55 m
no fares
MEX · 7 km
2 h 15 m
€101-154
1 stop
PMO · 25 km
MadridMAD
11 h 20 m
no fares
MEX · 7 km
2 h 25 m
€92-140
1 stop
PMO · 25 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

MeasureMexico CityPalermo
Official languageSpanish, Nahuatl, Yucatec MayaItalian
CurrencyMexican Peso (MXN)Euro (EUR)
SocketsAB127 V, 60 HzCFL230 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideRightRight
Time zoneUTC-6UTC+1, UTC+2 in summer
Emergency number911112
Elevation2,240 m14 m
Main airportMexico City Benito Juárez International Airport (MEX)7 km from centre95 non-stop destinationsFalcone–Borsellino Airport (PMO)25 km from centre103 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year9 days13 days

By the numbers

MeasureMexico CityPalermo
City population9,209,944630,167
People per km²6,2023,924
Museums within 10 km10842
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km61
Distinct cuisines in the centre5033
Swim season, months above 21 °C5 months

Where else could you go?

Every comparison below shares a destination with this one, so you can follow Mexico City or Palermo 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. 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. Sea surface temperature from NOAA OISST v2.1, NOAA Physical Sciences Laboratory. 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.