Retirement location shortlist climate check, verified

By Christoph Wackher

Look at any “best places to retire abroad” list and Cuenca turns up next to the same handful of cities every time: Chiang Mai, Merida, Panama City, Penang, Da Nang. They get grouped together because they score well on what those lists measure — cost of living, visa ease, healthcare, safety, a foreign community big enough to feel unremarkable. None of that measures the one thing you actually live inside every day, which is the air outside your door. So I ran the climate numbers on all five the same way I ran Quito’s in an earlier column, and it turns out Cuenca does not belong on the same page as any of them.

Penang, Malaysia

Start with hours lost to heat — daylight hours in the year when it is too hot to be comfortable outside, by the same measure applied across all 478 cities in the dataset. Cuenca loses zero. Not nearly zero: zero, exactly, every month of the year. Chiang Mai loses 2,981 hours a year to heat. Merida loses 3,062. Panama City loses 3,066. Da Nang loses 2,580. Penang loses 3,658 — more hours than there are in four whole months. Averaged, those five lose just over 3,000 hours a year to heat alone. Cuenca loses none.

It shows up in the overall total the same way. Cuenca comes out at 3,415 usable outdoor hours a year, 35th of the 478 cities in the dataset. Da Nang manages 1,482 (446th). Chiang Mai gets 1,373 (452nd). Merida gets 1,292 (455th). Panama City gets 1,134 (460th). Penang gets 619 — 477th of 478, second-worst city in the entire dataset, ahead of only Kuching. Cuenca has nearly three times the usable outdoor hours of the average of these five places it keeps getting filed next to.

Here is the part that made me check the numbers twice. Every one of those five cities gets more raw sunshine than Cuenca does. Chiang Mai: 2,589 hours a year against Cuenca’s 1,971. Merida: 2,685. Penang: 2,274. Da Nang: 2,342. Panama City is the one near-exception at 1,910, still short of Cuenca by only 61 hours. On the number every travel article leads with, Cuenca is the dim one of the six. Outdoors, it is the only one of the six you can actually stand to be in for most of the year.

The reason is temperature, not cloud cover. Cuenca’s daytime high runs between 16.5C and 18.3C across the entire year, a swing of under two degrees, and it never once crosses into the range this dataset counts as too hot. Chiang Mai’s April daytime high averages 36.3C. Merida’s May average is 36.1C. Panama City sits between 28.5C and 30.1C year-round with no real cool season at all — it loses fewer hours to heat than Penang only because it also loses a lot more to rain. None of those are bad afternoons; they are the 30-year climate normal, every year. Cuenca’s elevation, a little over 2,500 metres, is doing the work the sun can’t: at that height the air does not get hot, whatever the sunshine total says.

I want to be careful about what this does and does not show. It does not mean Chiang Mai or Panama City are worse places to retire — they win on plenty of things this dataset has nothing to say about, and plenty of people who move there want the heat and know exactly what they are choosing. What it means is that the lists putting these six cities on one page are answering a different question than “which of these is comfortable to be outside in,” and if that question matters to you, the answer here is not close.

Two caveats, same as last time. These are 30-year climate normals, not a forecast for next July — a typical year is a thing that does not actually happen in any single year. And “too hot to be comfortable outside” is a threshold I built myself, combining heat, humidity and wind into one number and drawing a line through it. It is not a government standard and no meteorological body endorses it. It is applied identically to all 478 cities, which is what makes the comparison fair, but take the ordering seriously and the exact hour counts with a pinch of salt.

As always, if a figure here looks wrong to someone who has actually lived through a Chiang Mai April or a Merida May, send it back and I will check it against the dataset and say so plainly if we’re wrong. The full method, and the list of weather stations the sunshine figures are corrected against, are published at georank.place/methodology. The dataset itself is archived with a DOI at Zenodo, so anyone can check these numbers against a fixed version.
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Christoph Wackher builds GeoRank, a free map-based tool for comparing places to live. The underlying dataset is open under CC BY 4.0.

Verification table — every figure above, and where it came from
Source: georank.place/data/cities-tools.json

Cuenca usable outdoor h/yr | 3,415 (rank 35 of 478) | sum(out) | cuenca-ec
Cuenca hours lost to heat | 0 | outBreak[0] | cuenca-ec
Cuenca sunshine h/yr | 1,971 | sun | cuenca-ec
Cuenca daytime-high range | 16.5-18.3C | tempHigh | cuenca-ec
Chiang Mai usable outdoor h/yr | 1,373 (rank 452 of 478) | sum(out) | chiang-mai-th
Chiang Mai hours lost to heat | 2,981 | outBreak[0] | chiang-mai-th
Chiang Mai sunshine h/yr | 2,589 | sun | chiang-mai-th
Chiang Mai April daytime high | 36.3C | tempHigh[3] | chiang-mai-th
Merida usable outdoor h/yr | 1,292 (rank 455 of 478) | sum(out) | merida-mx
Merida hours lost to heat | 3,062 | outBreak[0] | merida-mx
Merida sunshine h/yr | 2,685 | sun | merida-mx
Merida May daytime high | 36.1C | tempHigh[4] | merida-mx
Panama City usable outdoor h/yr | 1,134 (rank 460 of 478) | sum(out) | panama-city-pa
Panama City hours lost to heat | 3,066 | outBreak[0] | panama-city-pa
Panama City sunshine h/yr | 1,910 | sun | panama-city-pa
Panama City daytime-high range | 28.5-30.1C | tempHigh | panama-city-pa
Penang usable outdoor h/yr | 619 (rank 477 of 478) | sum(out) | penang-my
Penang hours lost to heat | 3,658 | outBreak[0] | penang-my
Penang sunshine h/yr | 2,274 | sun | penang-my
Da Nang usable outdoor h/yr | 1,482 (rank 446 of 478) | sum(out) | da-nang-vn
Da Nang hours lost to heat | 2,580 | outBreak[0] | da-nang-vn
Da Nang sunshine h/yr | 2,342 | sun | da-nang-vn
Worst city in the dataset (478th) | Kuching, Malaysia — 471 h/yr | sum(out) | kuching-my
Cities losing zero hours a year to heat | 35 of 478 | outBreak[0] == 0 | derived

Not from the dataset: Cuenca’s elevation (~2,560 m) is common knowledge and is not a field in the data. Used only to explain the temperature pattern, not to support any figure above.