Cape Town or Málaga: which climate?
Cape Town (South Africa) has a warm-summer mediterranean climate, whereas Málaga (Spain) has a hot-summer mediterranean climate, according to the Köppen-Geiger classification.
The values compared here are normals computed over 86 complete calendar years, from 1940 to 2025, using ERA5 reanalysis data from the Copernicus programme. The same method and the same period apply to Cape Town and to Málaga.
Cape Town and Málaga have the same mean annual temperature, about 16.3 °C: the gap between the two cities is too small to be told apart from the noise in the data.
Cape Town gets more rain than Málaga: 539 mm per year against 474 mm.
Málaga has warmed by +1.8 °C between 1940 and 2025, against +0.8 °C in Cape Town. Málaga is therefore warming faster than Cape Town. Both trends are statistically significant.
Cape Town averages 0 hot days (≥ 30 °C) and 0 frost days per year; Málaga averages 16 and 0.
Data from ERA5 reanalysis (Copernicus Climate Change Service), redistributed under a CC-BY 4.0 licence. Normals are recomputed whenever the archive is updated.
| Indicator | Cape Town | Málaga | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mean daily temperature | 16.3 °C | 16.5 °C | negligible |
| Average daily high | 18.7 °C | 20.3 °C | +1.6 °C |
| Average daily low | 14.4 °C | 12.8 °C | -1.6 °C |
| Annual rainfall | 539 mm | 474 mm | -65 mm |
| Sunshine / day | 10.9 h | 10.8 h | negligible |
| Hot days (≥ 30 °C) | 0 d/yr | 16 d/yr | +16 d/yr |
| Frost days (< 0 °C) | 0 d/yr | 0 d/yr | negligible |
| Rainy days (≥ 1 mm) | 77 d/yr | 66 d/yr | -11 d/yr |
| Mean relative humidity | 78 % | 71 % | -7 % |
| Average peak wind | 26.3 km/h | 13.3 km/h | -13.0 km/h |
A difference is only reported when it exceeds the resolution of the data. ERA5 is a reanalysis on a grid of about 31 km: two nearby cities often fall in the same cell, and below half a degree you are reading the grid, not the climate.