Where clouds are a special event
8 of the Sunniest Cities in the World
Desert capitals and Mediterranean coasts that log over 3,500 hours of sunshine a year — almost double the global average.
Earth gets about 4,400 daylight hours a year. The very sunniest cities turn 80% of those into actual sunshine — meaning weeks can go by with barely a cloud in the sky.
How we chose these ↓ — jump to the full scoring system at the bottom of the article.
Dubai, United Arab Emirates · pop. 4,248,200
Dubai matches Riyadh hour-for-hour on sunshine: cloud cover is essentially statistical noise on the annual chart. The UAE National Center of Meteorology records over 3,500 sunshine hours a year and roughly 25 rainy days in total.
The Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum Solar Park outside the city is one of the largest single-site solar power facilities under construction in the world, targeting 5 GW by 2030. See also our hottest cities and most-visited tourist cities lists.
Riyadh, Saudi Arabia · pop. 5,188,286
Riyadh's clear desert air gives it roughly 3,500 sunshine hours a year, paired with the world-class heat to match (see our hottest cities list). The Saudi General Authority of Meteorology and Environmental Protection records less than 100 mm of rain a year.
The city is one of the world's largest electricity consumers per capita, with air conditioning driving more than half of summer demand. NEOM and Saudi Arabia's wider renewable-energy strategy depends substantially on the country's solar potential, of which Riyadh is the urban centre.
Andalusia, Spain · pop. 551,480
Málaga is the sunniest large city in mainland Europe, averaging roughly 2,900 sunshine hours a year. The Costa del Sol name is a literal description: cloud cover stays below 30% for the majority of the year.
The city's transformation from a backpacker and package-tour stop to a serious cultural destination accelerated after the Centre Pompidou Málaga opened in 2015. Picasso was born here, and the Museo Picasso Málaga anchors the historic centre.
Western Australia, Australia
Perth is the sunniest large city in Australia and one of the sunniest capitals anywhere, averaging over 3,200 sunshine hours a year. Western Australia's Bureau of Meteorology consistently ranks it well above Sydney, Melbourne or Brisbane on annual sunshine totals.
The city's isolation — Adelaide is roughly 2,700 km away and the nearest comparable city is essentially Singapore — has produced a distinctive economy heavily weighted toward mining, port logistics and time-zone-aligned services to Asia.
Antofagasta, Chile · pop. 157,575
Calama, in the Atacama Desert at 2,200 m, has some of the world's clearest, driest air. Annual rainfall in the surrounding desert is the lowest of any non-polar region on Earth (a few mm a year or less), and several decade-long stretches of total rainlessness are documented.
The city anchors Chuquicamata, one of the world's largest open-pit copper mines. The exceptionally clean and dry skies are also why the European Southern Observatory's Paranal and ALMA facilities are sited in the Atacama.
Aswan, Egypt · pop. 241,261
Aswan sits at the edge of the Sahara and the Nile and is one of the sunniest places on Earth, with roughly 4,000 sunshine hours a year and average annual rainfall under 1 mm. The Egyptian Meteorological Authority records that Aswan can go several consecutive years without a measurable rainfall.
The Aswan High Dam, completed in 1970, fundamentally restructured the Nile's hydrology and created Lake Nasser. The city is the staging point for tourism to Abu Simbel and the Philae temple complex.
Arizona, United States · pop. 1,673,122
Phoenix logs roughly 3,870 sunshine hours a year — the sunniest large city (over a million residents) in the United States. The cloud cover is so consistently low that the city's solar industry routinely runs at higher capacity factors than almost any utility-scale solar elsewhere in the country.
The Phoenix metropolitan area has grown faster than almost any in the US over the past two decades, but the city's persistent summer heat is increasingly a serious public-health issue: 2023 and 2024 both set records for heat-related deaths.
Arizona, United States · pop. 95,548
Yuma, Arizona, is the sunniest city on Earth by most long-term measurements, averaging roughly 4,015 hours of sunshine a year, or about 90% of all possible daylight hours. The city sits in the Sonoran Desert near the Colorado River and has been a major US Army winter training site since World War II precisely because of its predictable weather.
Local agriculture, particularly winter lettuce, benefits enormously from the sunshine: Yuma produces roughly 90% of all leafy greens consumed in the US during the winter months. NOAA records have ranked Yuma #1 globally on percentage of possible sunshine for most years on file.
How we chose these
We ranked by annual sunshine hours and by percentage of possible sunshine, using long-term climate normals from national meteorological services (NOAA in the US, the Egyptian Meteorological Authority, the Chilean Dirección Meteorológica, Australia's Bureau of Meteorology, AEMET in Spain, the UAE NCM and the Saudi GAMEP). Where two cities are within a few percent on sunshine hours we favoured the larger or more visitable city. Polar regions and high-altitude observatories with technically high sunshine totals are excluded because they're not ordinary cities.
Sources & further reading
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For entertainment only. Rankings on this page are editorial picks compiled from public sources for fun and discovery — they aren't a scientific measurement. Population figures and place details come from open data; see the linked place pages for sources.