Baden-Baden or Dresden?

Neither town is a beach destination, and both send swimmers to the same kinds of places on hot days: outdoor pools and flooded gravel pits, with Dresden also having the ponds around Moritzburg. Dresden has the Elbe's sandy banks to sit on, though not to swim from, and Baden-Baden's water is all in its thermal baths.

Both eat well in a regional way, but the styles are different. Baden-Baden has Baden cooking with a French accent, Flammkuchen and Black Forest ham, and Riesling and Pinot Noir from the Rebland villages just outside town. The centre itself leans towards hotel dining and cake, and the serious restaurants lie out in the northern Black Forest.

Dresden's Saxon food is heavier, with sauerbraten and dumplings, plus Eierschecke and Stollen at coffee time and Elbe valley wines from Radebeul and Meissen. Its advantage is the Neustadt, where Vietnamese, Middle Eastern and beer-garden meals give a range that a small spa town does not have.

Dresden is in another league for sightseeing. The Old Masters in the Zwinger, the Green Vault in the Residenzschloss, the Albertinum's Romantic painting and the rebuilt Frauenkirche add up to several days of first-rate museums and monuments, though much of the old town is reconstruction set among post-war blocks.

Baden-Baden's appeal is the town as a whole: the Kurhaus, the Trinkhalle and the hillside villas of a spa resort that has kept its nineteenth-century fabric. The Museum Frieder Burda and the Kunsthalle are good, but a day or two covers it all.

Dresden has a real night out. The Äußere Neustadt fills with students in small bars, beer kiosks and courtyard pubs, there is pavement drinking on summer nights, and a handful of clubs run late at weekends.

Baden-Baden's evening centres on the Kurhaus casino, with its dress code and gilded rooms, followed by a hotel or wine bar and an early night among an older crowd. Anyone wanting more has to travel to Karlsruhe or Strasbourg.

The choice here is between fir forest and sandstone rock. Baden-Baden opens straight onto the northern Black Forest: the Merkur funicular climbs to views across the Rhine plain to the Vosges, climbers use the Battert cliffs, and the High Road follows the ridge past the dark Mummelsee to the Hornisgrinde moorland at over 1,100m. It is rolling wooded upland, at its best in autumn colour and much easier to explore with a car.

Dresden's showpiece is Saxon Switzerland, upriver by suburban train, where the Bastei looks down on the Elbe and the Malerweg links several days of walking among towers and gorges that helped give birth to free climbing. Closer in, the Elbe cycle route runs past vineyards and palaces, and the Ore Mountains add cross-country skiing in winter.

Both are excellent bases, one facing France and the other facing the east. From Baden-Baden, Strasbourg and the Alsace wine villages, Heidelberg, Freiburg and the UNESCO sites at Speyer and Maulbronn are all about an hour away, though a car helps.

From Dresden, the outings are mostly by train: porcelain and cathedral at Meissen, the lake lodge at Moritzburg, Königstein fortress, Leipzig, intact Görlitz, and Prague at the far edge of a long day.

Dresden is the easier city with children. The zoo and the child-run miniature railway in the Großer Garten, the Transport Museum, the hands-on section of the Hygiene Museum and the paddle steamers all lie within the city.

Baden-Baden is safe and calm, and the funicular and forest trails go down well, but it is built for adults and the Friedrichsbad turns away young children. Its biggest family draw is Europa-Park, an hour south, which beats anything in Dresden's area but means spending the day out of town.

Both centres are compact enough to walk, but Dresden has the better network once you leave the centre. Trams reach the Großer Garten and the Blue Wonder bridge, and suburban trains run to Meissen and into the national park, so a car is never needed.

In Baden-Baden the sights are close together but some streets are steep, the station is a bus ride away in Oos, and the High Road, the wine villages and Alsace are much easier to reach with a car.

Neither is a strong shopping destination, and they serve different tastes. Baden-Baden's Sophienstraße and Lange Straße are for jewellers, watchmakers and boutiques catering to a well-off spa crowd, while Dresden has chain stores on Prager Straße, vintage and design shops in the Neustadt, Meissen porcelain and Ore Mountain wooden toys. At Advent, the Striezelmarkt gives Dresden a season that Baden-Baden has nothing to match.

Dresden costs noticeably less. Its hotels are reasonable for most of the year, Neustadt meals are good value and a single day ticket covers trams and trains, though the separate museum entries add up.

Baden-Baden was built for the wealthy and still prices itself that way, with grand hotels and a charge for every visit to the baths. Guesthouses, bakeries and wine taverns soften the cost, but a stay built around the spas soon gets expensive.

Both are serious classical music towns, but Dresden's tradition runs deeper. The Semperoper and its Staatskapelle, with Wagner and Strauss premieres in their history, the Kreuzchor in the Kreuzkirche and the Philharmonic in the Kulturpalast make an evening of first-class music easy to find, and the Dixieland festival adds lighter fare.

Baden-Baden does remarkably well for its size. The Festspielhaus in the old station attracts international orchestras and opera, and the Brahms and Clara Schumann connections still matter. Outside classical music, though, there is little on offer.

This is where Baden-Baden stands apart. Roman-era hot springs feed the Friedrichsbad, with its domed halls and silent sequence of rooms, and the large thermal pools and saunas of Caracalla, and the whole town keeps to the slow pace of a spa cure.

Dresden can offer the ordinary German pleasure of a municipal sauna, the nearest thermal pool at Bad Schandau, and quiet afternoons on the Elbe meadows. That is restful, but it does not compare with a town built around taking the waters.