Ranked on daytime temperature and how dry the month is. The sea temperature is printed on every coastal card whether or not it is swimmable — that is the difference between this list and the next one.
Right now · September
28.7 °C by day and 29 mm of rain. About as good as this month gets.
Cairns and the reef coast: the dry season runs May to October, and the wet season doubles as cyclone season.
CAIRNS AERO · Bureau of Meteorology · 1991–2020 · Checked 2026-08-12
31.4 °C by day and 28 mm of rain. About as good as this month gets.
Turkey's Mediterranean coast, sheltered by the Taurus range, with a long hot summer and a mild wet winter.
FINIKE, 81 km away · MGM / WMO CLINO · 1991–2020 · 21 of 30 years · Checked 2026-08-12
25.4 °C by day and 68 mm of rain. About as good as this month gets.
Subtropical Indian Ocean, warmest from December to March — which is also its cyclone season.
PLAISANCE (MAURITIU, 36 km away · Mauritius Met Service · 1991–2020 · 20 of 30 years · Checked 2026-08-12
35 °C and almost no rain. Hot enough that the middle of the day is indoors.
Red Sea reef coast with effectively no rain, a warm winter sea, and summers that pass 35 °C.
Daytime maxima above 34 °C. The middle of the day is for indoors, and that is true even where the sea is perfect.
HURGUADA · EMA / WMO CLINO · 1991–2020 · 13 of 30 years · Checked 2026-08-12
35.1 °C, and 101 mm of rain on top of it.
Trincomalee and Arugam Bay, in the rain shadow of the southwest monsoon: dry exactly when the other coast is not.
Daytime maxima above 34 °C. The middle of the day is for indoors, and that is true even where the sea is perfect.
Rainfall is high enough to change what you do, not just what you pack.
CHINA BAY · Sri Lanka DoM · 1991–2020 · 9 of 30 years · Checked 2026-08-12
20.2 °C by day, but the sea is 15 °C. Warm to walk in, cold to swim in.
A near-perfect summer city: 27 °C and almost no rain in January, over a 17 °C Atlantic that almost nobody swims in.
The water is below 22 °C, the point most northern-European swimmers stop calling it swimming. Fine for a walk on the beach; a shock in it.
CAPE TOWN INTL · SAWS / WMO CLINO · 1991–2020 · 22 of 30 years · Checked 2026-08-12
We show at most two places per country so one country cannot fill the list.
A ranking that will not show its criteria is an opinion. These are ours.
Warm days mean a mean daily maximum of 25–33 °C, scoring nothing below 20 °C or above 36 °C. The upper bound is not a formality: Dubai in July is 41 °C, and a list that treats hotter as better puts it first.
Swimmable means a sea of at least 22 °C. There is no meteorological standard for this — it is the convention northern-European travel publishers use, and we are telling you so rather than implying otherwise.
The criteria multiply rather than add, so a perfect air temperature cannot compensate for a cold sea. That is the whole reason the warm list and the swimming list are two separate lists.
Snow reliability is classified against the 100-day rule (Abegg 1996, after Föhn 1990): snow-reliable means at least 30 cm of cover on at least 100 days between 1 December and 15 April, in seven winters out of ten, with the line at about 1,200 m in the Swiss Alps. We classify against that rule and cite it; we do not compute it, because no free dataset carries per-resort snow depth.
Aurora is ranked on corrected geomagnetic latitude, not geographic latitude, and on median winter cloud. The oval sits at roughly 65–70° geomagnetic and moves about 2° equatorward per unit of Kp.
Tropical-cyclone seasons are applied separately from rainfall. A peak month is excluded outright; a shoulder month is capped no matter how dry it is.
Temperature and rainfall are 1991–2020 monthly normals computed from NOAA's Global Historical Climatology Network station records — the station used for each destination is named on its card, along with how far away it is. Sea-surface temperature comes from NOAA OISST v2.1 over the same period. Rain days count days with at least 2.5 mm.
These are thirty-year averages, not a forecast. They tell you what a month is usually like, never what next Tuesday will be.
Almost always the sea. The Canaries in January are 21 °C in the air and 19 °C in the water — a genuine answer to "somewhere warm" and a bad answer to "somewhere I can swim". Rather than pick one meaning and be wrong for half of you, we run two lists.
Because for about half of these places the town temperature is the wrong number. Chamonix's valley sits at 1,035 m and is often green in January while its lifts reach 3,842 m. The elevation pair tells you what you actually need to know; a valley temperature would just mislead you confidently.
December has the most hours of darkness and the worst odds per hour. Geomagnetic activity peaks around the equinoxes — the Russell–McPherron effect — so March and September–October are roughly twice as likely to deliver. If you can only travel in December you will still see them; you will just need more nights.
No. Every number here is a 1991–2020 average from a named weather station. They describe what a month is usually like. For the next two weeks, use a forecast.
Usually because there is no weather station near it with a long enough record, and we would rather leave a place out than publish a number measured 400 km away. Palawan is out for exactly that reason.
Otherwise January's warm list is eight Spanish islands. The cap is applied after ranking, so it never changes which place is better — only how many of one country's you see at once.
Take the destination and the month straight into the packing calculator — it will use the real forecast when you get close enough for one.