Baden-Baden or Hallstatt?

Neither place is for a swimming trip, but Hallstatt at least has water on its doorstep. Its cold, clear Alpine lake has a bathing lawn in the village and a lido at Obertraun, good for a bracing dip after a hike in July or August.

Baden-Baden has no lake or shore of its own. In summer the choices are outdoor pools and the flooded gravel pits of the Rhine plain. Its real water culture is indoors, in the thermal baths.

Baden-Baden eats far better. It sits in Baden's wine country, with Riesling and Pinot Noir from Varnhalt and Neuweier, and regional cooking with a French accent from across the Rhine. Some of Germany's most celebrated restaurants are a drive away in the northern Black Forest, even if the town centre is mostly hotel dining rooms and cafés.

Hallstatt has a few guesthouse kitchens serving schnitzel and goulash, and char or whitefish from the lake is the one dish worth looking for. Kitchens close early, and for anything more people head to the old patisseries of Bad Ischl.

In both places the town itself is the main sight, but Baden-Baden has more to fill your days. It has the Kurhaus, the Trinkhalle and the hillside villas of one of the Great Spa Towns of Europe. Add the Museum Frieder Burda and the Kunsthalle for art, plus the Brahms house and the Russian church.

Hallstatt's history goes back much further but covers less ground. People have mined salt here for some seven thousand years, and the Iron Age graves gave their name to a whole early European culture. The salt mine and the painted skulls of the Beinhaus are fascinating, but a day covers them.

Neither is a place for a late night, but Baden-Baden at least gives you somewhere to go after dinner. The evening centres on the Kurhaus casino, where you dress up for the gilded gaming rooms. Otherwise it's a drink in a grand hotel, a glass of Riesling in a wine bar or a quiet pint in the old town. The scene is grown-up and finishes early, so anyone who wants to dance takes the train to Karlsruhe or crosses the Rhine to Strasbourg.

Hallstatt has no scene at all. Once the day trippers have gone, the village has nothing to offer after dark beyond dinner and wine by the water. Guests who stay the night usually come for exactly that silence, but there is nowhere to go on to afterwards.

Both sit at the edge of wild country, but at very different heights. Baden-Baden's northern Black Forest is wooded upland. You get the Merkur funicular, the Battert cliffs, the Panoramaweg through the vineyards, and the High Road out to the Mummelsee and the Hornisgrinde moor, all gentle and lovely in autumn.

Hallstatt is real Alpine country, with the Dachstein massif rising straight above the lake. The Krippenstein cable car to the Five Fingers platform, the ice caves, the Gosausee, hut-to-hut routes and via ferratas make it the stronger choice for mountains, though mist and rain can hold up plans for days.

From Baden-Baden you can reach two countries. Strasbourg and the Alsace wine route, Heidelberg and Freiburg are each about an hour away, and so are the UNESCO-listed cathedral at Speyer and the monastery at Maulbronn.

Hallstatt's outings are lovely but more alike: lake towns of the Salzkammergut such as Bad Ischl with the Habsburg Kaiservilla, St Wolfgang and Gmunden. Salzburg is the big draw, but it makes a long day, and without a car every trip needs planning.

Neither is built for children, and both work best as a base for a few highlights. In Baden-Baden the main ones are out of town, above all Europa-Park about an hour south. The town itself is calm and easy to walk, though the Friedrichsbad turns young children away.

Hallstatt's highlights are on the spot: the wooden slides and underground lake in the salt mine, the ice caves and rowing boats. The steep, crowded lane is hard work with small children, though, and many families sleep in Obertraun instead.

You walk everywhere in both centres, and both have steep streets. The difference is how you get in and out. Baden-Baden is on a main railway line, and frequent buses run from the Oos station, so Karlsruhe or Freiburg are easy without a car. Hallstatt's station is across the lake, reached by a small boat, and regional buses thin out after summer, so a car matters more here.

Baden-Baden is the better place to browse, with jewellers, watchmakers, boutiques and delicatessens along Sophienstraße and Lange Straße, though nothing on a big-city scale. Hallstatt has one lane of souvenir shops, where salt from the mine, sold in grinders or as bath mixes, is the one thing truly from the place.

Both are expensive, for different reasons. Baden-Baden was built for the wealthy, so grand hotels and baths that charge for every visit push the bill up, though bakeries, wine taverns and simple guesthouses are fair by German standards.

Hallstatt is expensive because it has few rooms and visitors come from all over the world. The usual way to save is to stay in Obertraun, Bad Goisern or Bad Ischl and come in for the day.

The gap here is wide. Baden-Baden has the Festspielhaus, one of Germany's largest opera and concert houses, its own philharmonic in the Kurhaus and an ornate nineteenth-century theatre, in a town where Brahms and Clara Schumann both worked.

Hallstatt has a brass band on feast days and the odd church concert in summer. For a proper evening of music you would go to Salzburg, or to Bad Ischl for its summer operetta.

Baden-Baden is one of Europe's great bathing towns. It has the silent, unclothed sequence of rooms at the Friedrichsbad, the pools and saunas of Caracalla, hotel spas, and a whole town that moves slowly.

Hallstatt offers a different kind of calm, with misty mornings on the lake and quiet evenings once the tour groups leave, but little beyond hotel saunas. The brine baths are half an hour away in Bad Ischl, and the crowded midday lane can easily break the peace.