January is the month the winter-sun market works hardest, and the month its language is loosest. Almost every destination sold as winter sun can produce a respectable average maximum temperature, because a January afternoon in the right spot is pleasant nearly everywhere on the list. The question a buyer is actually asking is different: will it be warm enough to be outside all day, dry enough to plan around, and will the sea be swimmable. Those three things are all published. They are just rarely published together.
This page puts them together. Every figure below comes from the climate tables issued by Germany’s national meteorological service, the Deutscher Wetterdienst, which produces a standard one-page Klimatafel for airports and cities worldwide in an identical layout. Using one publisher rather than twenty means the columns line up and the definitions match. It does not fix the reference periods, which vary a great deal, and that problem is dealt with honestly below rather than hidden.
If January has to include swimming and reliably outdoor days, Cape Verde is the only unambiguous answer in this table: Sal and Praia post average maxima of 24.0 °C and 24.8 °C, a sea at 23 °C, and effectively no rain. The Canaries are the sensible compromise, roughly four hours from the UK, at 20 to 21.5 °C with an 18 to 19 °C sea, which is bracing but usable. The Mediterranean is not winter sun and the numbers are blunt about it: Málaga, Faro, Malta and Larnaca all sit between 15.2 and 16.5 °C with seas of 12 to 17 °C and eight to twelve rain days. Those are good winter city breaks. They are not beach weeks. Madeira sits in its own category, warm enough but wet, at 103 mm across eight rain days.
The shortlist is shorter than it looks
Rank the twenty stations by average daily maximum and the top of the list separates cleanly, but the middle does not. Between 20.0 °C and 21.5 °C sit six different places across two archipelagos. Between 15.2 °C and 17.1 °C sit another six across four countries. Inside those bands the temperature column has stopped telling you anything useful, and yet it is the column almost every comparison stops at.
What breaks the ties is the rest of the table. Two stations a degree apart on temperature can be four hours a day apart on sunshine, or ten rain days apart across the month, or six degrees apart in the water. Those differences are the difference between the holiday people booked and the holiday they got.
The Atlantic table
The Atlantic islands are where the winter-sun question is genuinely answerable. Stations are listed with altitude, and with the reference period for the temperature series, because those periods are not the same and it matters.
| Station (altitude) | Mean daily max | Mean daily min | Rain | Sun per day | Sea | Period |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Praia, Santiago, Cape Verde (27 m) | 24.8 °C | 20.0 °C | 2 mm, under 1 day | 7.2 h | 23 °C | 1941–1960 |
| Sal, Cape Verde (54 m) | 24.0 °C | 18.8 °C | 5.3 mm, 0.7 days | 5.9 h | 23 °C | 1961–1990 |
| Tenerife Sur airport (64 m) | 21.5 °C | 15.7 °C | 14 mm, 0.7 days | 6.2 h | 19 °C | 1983–1995 |
| Santa Cruz de Tenerife (35 m) | 20.8 °C | 15.1 °C | 36.7 mm, 5 days | 5.8 h | 19 °C | 1961–1990 |
| Las Palmas, Gran Canaria (24 m) | 20.7 °C | 15.4 °C | 16.9 mm, 3.1 days | 6.2 h | not published | 1991–2010 |
| Arrecife, Lanzarote (14 m) | 20.4 °C | 13.7 °C | 24 mm, 4 days | 6.7 h | 18 °C | 1972–2000 |
| Fuerteventura airport (22 m) | 20.2 °C | 14.1 °C | 19 mm, 3 days | 6.3 h | 18 °C | 1969–1990 |
| La Palma airport (29 m) | 20.0 °C | 15.2 °C | 58 mm, 6 days | 4.5 h | not published | 1971–2000 |
| Funchal, Madeira (58 m) | 19.1 °C | 13.1 °C | 103 mm, 8 days | 4.5 h | 18 °C | 1961–1990 |
| Santa Maria, Azores (93 m) | 16.8 °C | 12.1 °C | 100 mm, 12 days | 3.0 h | not published | 1961–1990 |
| Izaña, Tenerife (2,367 m) | 7.6 °C | 1.0 °C | 90 mm, 5 days | 7.5 h | not applicable | 1961–1990 |
The sea is the number nobody prints
Of everything in these tables, average sea temperature is both the most decisive for a beach holiday and the least likely to appear in a comparison. In January it ranges from 12 °C at Málaga to 23 °C at Sal and Praia. Eleven degrees is not a nuance. It is the difference between an ordinary swim and a cold-water endurance event.
The ranking it produces is also not the ranking the temperature column produces. Málaga posts a January maximum of 16.5 °C, ahead of Larnaca, Faro, Djerba and Malta, and has the coldest water of any station here. Larnaca is cooler in the air at 16.3 °C and five degrees warmer in the sea at 17 °C. If a trip is being sold on the beach, the water column should outrank the air column, and it almost never does.
For the Canaries the honest figure is 18 to 19 °C. That is swimmable for most people for a while, particularly on a sunny afternoon, and it is a long way from the 23 °C of Cape Verde. Anyone who has been told the Canaries are “warm all year” is being told something true about the air and something misleading about the water.
The Mediterranean in January
The Mediterranean stations are worth tabulating precisely because they are so often included on winter-sun lists.
| Station (altitude) | Mean daily max | Mean daily min | Rain | Sun per day | Sea | Period |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Hurghada, Egypt (16 m) | 21.5 °C | 11.0 °C | 0.4 mm | not published | not published | 1971–2000 |
| Marrakech, Morocco (470 m) | 18.4 °C | 5.9 °C | 32.2 mm, 4 days | 7.1 h | inland | 1961–1990 |
| Casablanca, Morocco (62 m) | 17.1 °C | 8.4 °C | 62.2 mm, 7 days | 6.1 h | 16 °C | 1961–1990 |
| Paphos, Cyprus (11 m) | 16.9 °C | 9.4 °C | 101 mm, 12 days | 5.5 h | 16 °C | 1947–1976 |
| Málaga, Spain (16 m) | 16.5 °C | 7.8 °C | 82.9 mm, 6.4 days | 5.5 h | 12 °C | 1961–1990 |
| Larnaca, Cyprus (2 m) | 16.3 °C | 7.3 °C | 62 mm, 8 days | 5.8 h | 17 °C | 1976–1990 |
| Faro, Algarve (7 m) | 16.1 °C | 7.7 °C | 78 mm, 8 days | 5.5 h | 15 °C | 1961–1990 |
| Djerba, Tunisia (3 m) | 15.9 °C | 8.9 °C | 28.5 mm, 4 days | 6.7 h | 16 °C | 1961–1990 |
| Luqa, Malta (91 m) | 15.2 °C | 9.2 °C | 89 mm, 11 days | 5.1 h | 15 °C | 1961–1990 |
Two things stand out. The first is how cold the nights are. Málaga averages a 7.8 °C minimum, Larnaca 7.3 °C and Marrakech 5.9 °C, which is UK-in-April territory and means evenings happen indoors. The Atlantic islands do not do this: Sal holds 18.8 °C overnight and Praia 20.0 °C, so the evening stays part of the day.
The second is Hurghada, which is the strongest Mediterranean-region case and comes with a caveat. Its 21.5 °C maximum matches Tenerife Sur and its 0.4 mm of January rain is the driest figure on this page. Then the minimum is 11.0 °C, and the Deutscher Wetterdienst publishes neither a sunshine nor a sea-temperature row for the station, so two of the four columns that matter are simply absent. A hot, dry, cold-nighted desert coast is a real proposition, but it is being chosen on incomplete evidence and should be understood that way.
Sunshine hours separate the lookalikes
The last column that earns its place is average daily sunshine. La Palma and Fuerteventura are 0.2 °C apart on average maximum. On sunshine they are 4.5 hours against 6.3, which is a different holiday. Funchal matches La Palma at 4.5 hours, and the Azores station records 3.0, the lowest here, which is what a mid-Atlantic winter actually looks like.
At the other end, Praia records 7.2 hours a day and Marrakech 7.1. And the highest figure in the whole table belongs to somewhere nobody would book for warmth: Izaña, the observatory at 2,367 metres on Tenerife, at 7.5 hours a day with an average maximum of 7.6 °C. It is the sunniest place here because it sits above the cloud that the coastal stations are arguing about, which is a useful reminder that sunshine and warmth are two separate questions.
What to settle before paying
- Decide whether the sea is part of the holiday. If it is, the choice narrows to Cape Verde at 23 °C, or the Canaries at 18 to 19 °C with expectations managed. Everything else in this table is a coat-and-restaurant trip.
- Check the overnight minimum, not just the maximum. A 16 °C day with a 7 °C night is a different week from a 24 °C day with a 19 °C night, and the second one has usable evenings.
- Read the rain-days column before the rainfall column. Twelve rain days at Paphos or in the Azores affects a week far more than the millimetre total suggests.
- Treat any station with missing columns as unproven. Hurghada has no published sunshine or sea figure here, and Las Palmas, La Palma and the Azores station have no sea figure.
- Note the reference period against anything you rely on. Praia’s 1941–1960 series is the oldest on this page and the least safe to plan against.
- Book the flight length you will actually tolerate. Cape Verde wins the numbers and costs roughly two more hours each way than the Canaries, which is the real trade being made.
No prices appear on this page. January fares and packages move daily by departure airport and operator, and a figure published in August would be wrong by autumn. The numbers here do something a price cannot: they tell you which places can deliver the week you are imagining, before you start comparing what it costs. On that test the winter-sun list is a great deal shorter than the market implies, and the honest ranking has been sitting in published climate tables the whole time.
Sources and what they support
- Cape Verde, from the Deutscher Wetterdienst Klimatafel series: Sal, Santa Maria international airport (54 m; 24.0 °C, 18.8 °C, 5.3 mm across 0.7 days, 5.9 sunshine hours, 23 °C sea, 1961–1990) and Praia, Santiago (27 m; 24.8 °C, 20.0 °C, 2 mm, 7.2 sunshine hours, 23 °C sea, 1941–1960).
- Canary Islands, same series: Tenerife Sur, Santa Cruz de Tenerife, Las Palmas, Gando, Arrecife, Lanzarote, Fuerteventura, La Palma and Izaña at 2,367 m: the January maxima, minima, rainfall, rain days and sunshine hours quoted, and the 18 to 19 °C seas where a sea row is published.
- Madeira and the Azores: Funchal (58 m; 19.1 °C, 13.1 °C, 103 mm across 8 rain days, 4.5 sunshine hours, 18 °C sea, 1961–1990) and Santa Maria, Azores (93 m; 16.8 °C, 12.1 °C, 100 mm across 12 rain days, 3.0 sunshine hours, 1961–1990).
- Mediterranean and North African stations, same series: Málaga (the 12 °C January sea), Faro, Luqa, Malta, Larnaca, Paphos, Djerba, Marrakech, Casablanca and Hurghada, including the absence of sunshine and sea rows for Hurghada.
- Each Klimatafel states its own station altitude, coordinates and the measurement period for every row separately, which is why the periods quoted in the tables above differ by station and sometimes by row within a station.
- 20 August 2026
- January figures taken station by station from the Deutscher Wetterdienst Klimatafel series, chosen deliberately so that every destination is presented in an identical layout with identical definitions. Altitudes and reference periods recorded per station. Sea temperatures are quoted only where the source publishes a water-temperature row, and marked as not published where it does not. Fares and package prices are not quoted because they move daily by airport and operator.