Montevideo, Buenos Aires, Santiago de Chile and Panama City are the Latin American cities with better quality of life, according to a ranking released on Tuesday headed by Vienna (Austria), Zurich (Switzerland) and Auckland (New Zealand), with a predominance of European locations.

Of the top 10 cities out of the 211 covered by the "World Survey on Quality of Life 2011" prepared by Mercer Consulting, seven are from the old continent due to their infrastructure, good health care and a wide variety of leisure activities.

In South America, the best positioned on the list are Montevideo (77), Buenos Aires (81), and Santiago de Chile (90), while in Central America some are above it: Pointe a Pitre, in a respectable 63^rd position , followed by San Juan de Puerto Rico (72).

Below are Monterrey (104), San José (105), Asunción (112), Lima (118), Mexico City (121), Quito (124), Santo Domingo (129), Bogotá (130), Guatemala (142), La Paz (147), Caracas (164), Managua (166), San Salvador (168) and, near the bottom, Havana (189).

In contrast, European cities with more quality of life put the bar very high, from Vienna (1) Zurich (2), Munich (4), Düsseldorf (5), Frankfurt (7), Geneva (8), Bern and Copenhagen (which share the ninth place) to Amsterdam (12), Hamburg (16), Berlin (17), Luxembourg (19) and Stockholm (20).

Other cities featured in this sense are Brussels (22), Paris (30), Oslo (33), Helsinki (35) and London (38).

The first Spanish cities in this classification are Barcelona, in 40^th place, and Madrid in 43^rd.

The cities with worse quality of life are Khartoum, Port au Prince, N'Djamena, Bangui and Baghdad, which ranks last in the overall standings and also on the personal safety ranking.

The report takes New York (which ranks 47) as a benchmark to compare the different levels of quality of life, which evaluates aspects such as public services, leisure and housing, socio-cultural ambience, economic, political and social, educational level and the environment.

Canadian cities are the large cities in the Americas that rank higher, especially Vancouver (which shares fifth place with Germany's Düsseldorf), Ottawa (14), Toronto (15), and Montreal (22), all of them on the top 25 cities.

Meanwhile, Honolulu (29) and San Francisco (30) are the U.S. cities with the best quality of life.

The study also measures the level of personal security of each city, which takes into account factors such as the level of crime, domestic stability, effectiveness of law, and international relations of the country concerned, among others.

In this sense, Luxembourg leads the ranking of safest cities to live in, followed by the Swiss cities of Bern and Zurich, sharing the second position, while Barcelona and Madrid are relegated to positions 63 and 68 respectively.

At the opposite end, the three most dangerous cities are Abidjan (219), N'Djamena (220) and Baghdad (221).

Among the Latin American cities, Guatemala (179), Tegucigalpa (180), and Caracas (205) have the lowest rates of personal safety.

In the last year, some Libyan, Egyptian, Tunisian and Yemeni cities have dropped in the ranking due to the wave of protests that has swept the Middle East and North Africa.

According to Mercer, these lists help multinational companies and governments to establish the levels of support to be provided to their expatriate workers.