Bled or Vienna?

Neither has a sea, but Bled's lake makes a better swimming vacation. The water is clear and Alpine, warming to about 24°C in high summer. You can swim from lidos below the castle, from the shallow end near Velika Zaka or out to the island, and Bohinj's colder, wilder shore is nearby.

Vienna's bathing is an urban outing. People swim from the gravel banks of the Danube Island or the old lidos on the Alte Donau, usually after work. It is good for an afternoon, but you would not plan a trip around it.

Bled has one famous thing to eat, the kremšnita cream slice on a lakeside terrace. Beyond that it is mostly hotel dining rooms and pizzerias, and the better mountain cooking is found in farm inns in the valleys around it.

Vienna has a whole cuisine of its own: schnitzel and Tafelspitz in wood-panelled Beisl taverns, Sachertorte in the grand coffee houses, and young wine at Heuriger taverns in vineyards inside the city limits. Someone who travels to eat will be busy for a week here, but would run out of options in Bled within a day or two.

Bled's sights make a single well-known picture: the clifftop castle with its small museum, and the baroque island church you reach by pletna boat. Both are memorable, and most people have seen them by the end of the first day.

Vienna can fill a week or more. There are the Habsburg apartments and Treasury in the Hofburg, Schönbrunn, and St Stephen's at the centre of a UNESCO-listed old town. The Kunsthistorisches Museum, the Belvedere and the Leopold hold some of Europe's best painting, and the Secession and Otto Wagner's buildings add a second great period of architecture.

In Bled an evening means a drink on a hotel terrace and a walk along the lit shore, and the village is asleep before midnight. Vienna is no party capital either, but it has a proper night out. There are late bars and small clubs under the Gürtel railway arches, old-town pubs in the Bermuda Triangle and deckchair bars on the Danube Canal in summer, and in winter you can buy a ticket to a formal ball in a palace.

Bled is in another league here. It sits at the edge of the Julian Alps, with Triglav National Park, the Savica waterfall and the Pokljuka pastures half an hour away. You can go canyoning, rafting and paragliding, cross the Vršič pass into the Soča valley, and ski in winter.

Vienna's green spaces are gentler and closer to home. You can walk through vineyards up the Kahlenberg, explore the Donau-Auen floodplain forest or cycle through the Wachau. Its nearest real mountains, the Rax and Schneeberg, are about an hour and a half away.

Both make good bases, but the trips are of different kinds. From Bled you go out to see a small country: Ljubljana in under an hour, medieval Radovljica next door, the Postojna cave, Piran on the Adriatic, and the Austrian lakes through the Karawanks tunnel. A car helps for many of these.

Vienna's trips run along the Danube and across borders, mostly by train or boat. Bratislava is about an hour away and Brno not much further. There are the abbeys of Melk and Klosterneuburg, Dürnstein in the Wachau, and Haydn's Eisenstadt.

Bled is great for active children in summer, with rowing to the island to ring the bell, shallow lidos, and the toboggan run and rope park on Straža. When it rains, though, there is little to do.

Vienna gives families much more, whatever the weather. Schönbrunn Zoo and its maze, the Prater's Ferris wheel and rides, and sharks in the Haus des Meeres cover the fine days. The dinosaurs at the Natural History Museum, the Technical Museum and ZOOM cover the wet ones, and trams are easy with a pushchair.

You can walk Bled's lake path and centre easily, and buses and two small stations connect it to Ljubljana and Bohinj. The trailheads, Pokljuka and the Soča valley are poorly served by public transport, so most visitors hire a car.

Vienna is the opposite: a car only gets in the way there. Five U-Bahn lines, dense trams and buses all run on one ticket, the U-Bahn runs all night at weekends, and even the vineyard villages and the Danube Island are a ride away.

In Bled, shopping means honey, lace and painted beehive panels from a few lakeside stalls. Vienna has luxury houses on the Graben and Kohlmarkt, everyday fashion on Mariahilfer Strasse and independent designers in Neubau. It is also worth buying craft here: Augarten porcelain, crystal and Loden coats, along with the Christmas markets and the Saturday flea market by the Naschmarkt.

Overall the two cost about the same, but in different places. In Bled the premium is for the view: rooms by the lake cost more, especially in July and August, while guesthouses in Radovljica or Bohinj cost less and the trails are free.

In Vienna you pay capital-city prices for hotels and admission to the big museums. Cheap transport passes, sausage stands, Heuriger buffets and standing places at the State Opera keep the daily spend down.

This is where the two differ most. Bled has no venue of its own, only the odd summer concert in the castle or a church. In Vienna you can hear the Philharmonic in the Golden Hall of the Musikverein, see a different opera most nights at the State Opera, and catch operetta at the Volksoper, the Vienna Boys' Choir at Sunday Mass and drama at the Burgtheater. For music lovers, it is reason enough to choose Vienna.

Both are restful, in different ways. Bled grew up as a nineteenth-century health resort, and it relaxes you through stillness: dawn walks by the water, boat rides to the island, and hotel spas fed by the mild springs at the lake's eastern end.

Vienna has more proper thermal bathing. There are the large pools and saunas of Therme Wien, the Art Deco Amalienbad, and Baden's sulphur springs half an hour away. In between, you can spend long, unhurried afternoons in the coffee houses.