If you’re planning a trip to South America soon, you’d be advised to take a closer look at our list of 11 most expensive cities to visit in South America in 2015. If you are thinking – 2016 is on the corner, aren’t information for 2015 a bit old? – you should know that 2016 data naturally won’t be available for quite some time. Furthermore, things won’t change dramatically in a matter of few days – at least not across the entire continent. Some countries like Venezuela, for instance are economically unstable and prices there change day in, day out. In addition, complex currency and inflation situation makes Venezuelan cities hard to rate. This is the reason why we’ll exclude Caracas and co. from our list. Know, however, that Caracas would have made the list, even if its rankings would have been quite different depending on chosen official rates. In fact, Caracas and rest of larger Venezuelan cities might just be some of most expensive places in the world for expats.
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Compared to rest of the world, South America is generally considered more affordable – at least to some extent. Speaking of rest of the world, here’s a list of 20 most expensive cities to live in the world in 2015. Living in a city and visiting it are quite different things, though. While both groups of people share similar expenses in most categories, those that live in a city have to pay rents and taxes too, which tend to be game changers. If you’re only visiting one of countless South American cities, you probably won’t have to worry about that, but most likely will have to worry about hotel prices and, of course, other necessary commodities such as food.
For the purpose of this article, we have pulled the data from Mercer’s annual cost of living report for cities around the globe. While they tend to offer very precise ratings, Mercer only rates around 200 cities globally which is way too low a sample for us to use. Considering that only 10 or so South American cities in total have appeared in Mercer’s 2015 report, it’s clear why we’ve had to resort to other means. Instead of only naming cities from Mercer’s report, we have decided to combine it with Numbeo in order to fill the gaps. While La Paz in Bolivia, for instance rates 195th in the world judging by Mercer’s report (would have made the list), it’s inaccurate to expect that only Buenos Aires (rates 19th) is more expensive than La Paz, if we take Argentina into consideration. This is only an example of why we have used Numbeo as our secondary, but the equally important source. Here’s our list of 11 most expensive cities to visit in South America in 2015 judging by both Mercer and Numbeo data.
