How Cape Town and Medellin compare on cost, visas, working hours, weather, internet and safety. Every figure comes from our city guides and tools, checked and dated there.
Dollars and pounds at today's exchange rate. Download speeds are the typical figure from each guide, which says where it comes from: some are for the city, some for the whole country, so treat a small gap as no gap.
Rent, a coworking desk, a cheap lunch on each of 22 working days, and getting around: the same four costs our budget calculator uses. The rent figures aren't always the same kind of figure (some are furnished one-beds, some are averages across every size of flat), so read the note under each.
$951 to $1,020£714 to £767 a month
$1,080 to $2,110£810 to £1,580 a month
Remote work visa
The catch. Home Affairs counted 539 visas under the section that covers it in the year to March 2026, though that figure includes other visitor's visas. The regulation says R650,976, but Home Affairs and its embassies use R650,796.
Visa V Nomada Digital
The catch. The bar is pinned to the minimum wage, so it moves every January. The 2026 wage survived a court challenge in July, though a final ruling is still due.
See where your own income stands in every country. Check your income
A 9am to 5pm day in the employer's city, shown in local time, for today's date, so it allows for the clocks changing.
Different hours or another employer city? Use the time-zone planner
The average high in °C each month, coloured by the rule on our best-time page: green is a high of 20 to 32°C with under 150mm of rain; red is a high of 38°C or more or under 12°C, 250mm of rain or more, or 33°C or more with 150mm of rain or more. Hover over a month for its rain.
| City | Jan | Feb | Mar | Apr | May | Jun | Jul | Aug | Sep | Oct | Nov | Dec |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cape Town | 29° | 28° | 26° | 24° | 21° | 18° | 18° | 18° | 20° | 22° | 24° | 26° |
| Medellin | 28° | 28° | 28° | 28° | 28° | 28° | 29° | 29° | 28° | 27° | 27° | 27° |
Cape Town: seasons and events · Medellin: seasons and events
Level 2: increased caution
Level 3: reconsider travel
The US level is for the whole country, as the State Department sets it, and some countries have stricter advice for particular regions.
From each city guide, word for word.
Somebody earning above ZAR 650,976 a year from a foreign employer who wants mountain and sea before and after work, on European time zones. The visa exists and is issued, load-shedding has been off for well over a year, coworking is good and cheap in pounds, and March to April and October to November are glorious.
Anyone who wants to walk home alone at night, hike at dawn on their own, leave a bag on a car seat or drive in from the airport on autopilot. The FCDO warns of muggings on Lion's Head and Signal Hill and of targeted attacks on airport routes. Cape Town Central and Sea Point police stations sit near the top of the Western Cape's crime tables, and South Africa recorded 5,427 murders in three months this year. If you want a city you never have to think about, this is not it.
You want a city where the weather stops being a variable — 21 to 22 degrees every month, no heating, no air conditioning, no seasonal reckoning — and where a genuinely good metro means you never need a car. It suits asynchronous or US-facing work, because UTC-5 with no clock changes is the cleanest overlap with North America you will find down here. And it suits anyone who will actually learn Spanish, because the reward curve is steep: the difference between the Poblado bubble at 3.3 million pesos a month and real Medellin at 2.3 is mostly linguistic.
You are expecting the Instagram version. This is a Spanish-speaking city with the English proficiency of a country ranked 76th in the world, and every interaction that matters happens at a counter with a queue. It rains on twenty-five days in October. The nomad visa is a two-year cul-de-sac that leads nowhere near residency, the income bar jumped 23 per cent overnight because it is pinned to the minimum wage, and citizenship got harder rather than easier. And be clear-eyed about the crime: the murder rate is a third of the national average and falling, but El Poblado and Laureles are first and second in the city for drug-assisted robbery, with 428 cases by August against 227 in all of 2025. Both the British and American governments say so in writing.
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