Cape Town bags another accolade to its already impressive resume - the city now has the bluest sky in Africa.
According to research done by S Money data scientists, Cape Town tops the list on the continent, followed by Port Louis, Mauritius, in second place and Lilongwe in Malawi in third place.
Other destinations making the top 10 list in Africa included Victoria in Seychelles, Asmara in Eritrea, Windhoek in Namibia, Antananarivo in Madagascar, Lusaka in Zambia, Maseru in Lesotho and Mogadishu in Somalia.
The study revealed that Cape Town's Air Quality Index showed the healthiest air of any African capital. It stated that "although Cape Town is technically only a third of a capital (each branch of the South African government resides in a different city), it gets more than its share of blueberry-pie-coloured views“.
Lee McCullagh from NeoMam Studios told IOL Travel that the research took around 45 days to complete.
"S Money started by creating a list of every nation's capital city and then worked with a data scientist to analyse images of the sky. Ranking them according to the CIELAB colour scale, the team discovered which cities around the world have the bluest sky. They then figured out the hex colour code for each location to easily display the results online.
"South Africa’s hex code is 0966BB, making it the 13th bluest sky in the world, behind Washington DC," he revealed.
McCullagh shared the reasoning behind the research.
"Everyone seems to feel happier when seeing a blue sky, so the team wanted to look into where in the world had the bluest sky and perhaps entice them to visit somewhere new for their next trip.
"The team only looked at Cape Town in South Africa for this study. However, they did look at every other African capital city to compare the hue of blue across the continent," he added.
The bluest skies in the study came from four continents, including nine capital cities from Asia, Europe, North America, and Oceania.