Where is hot: holiday weather by month

Where is hot each month: the three warmest, near and far

Two patterns stand out. From December to March, the warmest short-haul places are the Canary Islands, a step ahead of Madeira and Marrakech, and the long-haul list is led by the tropics, where the temperature hardly moves through the year. From June to September, the hottest short-haul places are inland Spain, Marrakech and the eastern Mediterranean, and the tropics are no longer hotter by day; what changes there is the rain, as the monsoons and the hurricane season arrive.

Why we publish our own averages

Holiday weather pages are mostly written by companies that sell holidays, and the figures on them are rarely sourced. When we checked the pages that rank first for questions like "weather in Tenerife in March", the same page sometimes gave two different rainfall figures, or a sunshine figure in a table that disagreed with the text below it, with no station and no period. That is not a small matter if you are choosing between two islands on the strength of a two-degree difference.

We started from the raw data instead. For each place we picked one weather station from the Global Historical Climatology Network, the NOAA archive of daily records from more than a hundred thousand stations, and computed the averages ourselves: daytime high, night low, rain, and the number of days with a millimetre or more. The station is named on each page with the number of years behind its figures, and where a station has gaps, we leave a month blank rather than fill it. The sea comes from NOAA's daily sea surface temperature analysis, averaged over the same thirty years. The method page gives the rules and their limits.

How to use the finder

Choose the month you can travel, then the lowest daytime high you would be happy with. Twenty-four degrees is a good starting point for a beach holiday; twenty is pleasant for walking and sightseeing. Add a minimum sea temperature if you plan to swim: around twenty degrees most people swim without hesitation, at eighteen it is a quick dip. Limit the number of wet days if a rained-off day would spoil a short break. The distance is the straight line from London, which ranks places by how far they are but is not a flight time.

A place with no usable rain record for that month is never shown as a pass when you set a rain limit: it is marked "n/a" and sorted after the places that pass. That is the case in Madeira, Rhodes and Cape Verde, where the stations we use have too few complete months of rain in the period.

Every place at a glance

Short haul or long haul

For a week in the sun between November and March, the choice is narrow: the Canaries with a sea around twenty degrees, the Red Sea with a warmer sea and cooler nights in mid-winter, or a long flight. Hurghada averages 22 °C in January against 22 °C in Tenerife, with a sea of 23 °C. From April, the Mediterranean opens up from the south and the east: Cyprus and Antalya first, the Balearics in late May, the north of the Adriatic last.

Long haul is not always the warmer bet. In July, Larnaca averages 33 °C by day and Antalya 35 °C, as hot as Phuket at 32 °C, and with far less rain: 1 mm in Larnaca against 285 mm in Phuket, where July falls in the wet season. In the Caribbean, the Atlantic hurricane season runs from 1 June to 30 November according to the National Hurricane Center; our tables show the rain, not the storms, so read their seasonal advice before booking late summer.

The months, one by one

Each month has its own page with the full table of 62 places for that month: January, February, March, April, May, June, July, August, September, October, November, December. And each of the most searched destinations has a page with its twelve months side by side, a sea temperature line and the rain, such as Tenerife, Majorca, Crete, Dubai and Phuket. To put two places next to each other for the same month, use the comparison tool.