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Cape Town has a hot-summer Mediterranean climate.
Mild, rainy winters and hot, dry summers — here's what that means in plain terms.
What this climate feels like
The four things a regular visitor actually wants to know:
Highs near 28°C in February. About 15 days a year above 32 °C.
Lows near 7°C in July.
About 509 mm of rain a year. Wettest in June.
More sun than cloud through the year.
What "hot-summer Mediterranean" means
Climate scientists sort every place on Earth into about 30 climate types, based on how hot, cold, wet and dry it is across the year. Cape Town's type — hot-summer mediterranean — sits in the broad family of mild, temperate climates.
Researchers write climate types as a short letter code. Here is what each letter means:
Cities with the same climate as Cape Town
A hot-summer Mediterranean climate (Csa) — these recognizable cities share it. If you know one of them, you know roughly what to expect.
Has Cape Town's climate type changed?
A climate type is a coarse bucket. It can hold steady for years while the weather inside it shifts — or tip into the next bucket.
What this climate means for you
Wine grapes, olives, citrus, figs and rosemary thrive. Summer-active gardens need drip irrigation; cool-season crops do well over winter.
Spring and autumn are the perfect window — warm, dry and clear without summer's heat. Summer is hot but rain-free.
Sunny summers, mild winters and an outdoor lifestyle. Wildfires are the dominant summer risk in many areas.
Where these numbers come from
The climate type and the month-by-month figures on this page are computed from Cape Town's measured 30-year climate normals (1991–2020) — the same official records behind Cape Town's main climate page, so the two always agree.
Long-range climate maps measure things slightly differently and can place a city in a neighbouring category. Where they differ, this page uses the measured station record as the climate today.
Methodology & sources
Temperature & precipitation — 1991–2020 normals computed from 25 years of daily observations at Cape Town Intl, a weather station, about 17 km from the city centre. The underlying daily records come from NOAA's global station network.