🌆 Cancún

Mexico · Americas · 21.16°N, 86.85°W

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A fuller introduction to Cancún is briefly reloading — the key facts below always show.

Quick facts

CountryMexico
Continent / regionAmericas
Coordinates (approx.)21.16°N, 86.85°W · view on map

Cancún is in Mexico, a country in Americas. For the living forecast here, open World Weather; Cancún’s population and history are described by the sourced introduction above (from Wikipedia).

Where Cancún sits on the Earth

At 21.16° north of the equator, Cancún is about 2,353 km from the equator itself and 7,655 km from its nearest pole — and that puts it inside the tropics, where the sun passes directly overhead twice a year and the yearly swing in day length stays small. Latitude is only the sky’s address, of course: altitude, oceans and winds write the actual weather, which is why two cities on the same parallel can need overcoats in one place and sun hats in the other. The numbers on this page come straight from the town’s own coordinates.

Two consequences of that latitude anyone can test. On the equinox the midday sun stands 68.8° above the horizon here (straight up at the equator, lower the further you go). And because the Earth is a sphere turning once a day, a point at this latitude is carried around its axis at roughly 1,561 km/h — fastest at the equator, nothing at the poles. As for daylight: Cancún sees its longest day lasts about 13.3 hours of daylight and its shortest about 10.7.

Nearest cities on our list: Merida (288.2 km to the west), Havana (509.8 km to the east-northeast), Miami (850.1 km to the northeast), New Orleans (1,029 km to the north-northwest). Every profile here carries the same arithmetic, so the distances between any two of them can be checked by opening both pages.

The other side of the world: a straight line through the centre of the Earth from Cancún emerges at 21.16°S, 93.15°E — its antipode. The closest city on our list to that point is Bandung, about 2,219 km away; whether the antipode itself is ocean or land is a good quiz question before you look it up.

More cities in Mexico

Mexico City · Guadalajara · Monterrey · Oaxaca · Merida · Tijuana · Puerto Vallarta.

Coordinates are an approximate city centre. Introduction & image: Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0), cached 30 days; the page renders even if the feed is momentarily unreachable.

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