Brussels or Utrecht?

Neither city is a place for a beach vacation, and the North Sea is cold and windy from both. Brussels has the Belgian coast at Ostend, De Haan or Knokke a little over an hour away by train, with wide sandy beaches and promenades for a breezy day out. At home, swimming means indoor pools, some of them in handsome Art Deco buildings.

Utrecht's sea at Zandvoort or Scheveningen is a similar distance away. Its advantage is closer to hand: in a warm spell, the Maarsseveense Plassen and Strijkviertel lakes on the city's edge make an easy place to cool off.

Food is one of the widest gaps between the two. Brussels has a real cuisine of its own, with mussels, beer-braised carbonnade, waterzooi and shrimp croquettes, and a beer culture of Trappist ales and lambics brewed only in its region. Chocolatiers around the Sablon and the Congolese, Moroccan and Turkish kitchens of Matonge and Schaerbeek give it range as well as depth.

Utrecht is a pleasant place to eat, but people rarely travel there for the food. Its best meals come from the setting, on terraces in the old wharf cellars at the water's edge, along with casual Indonesian and Surinamese places and bistros around the Twijnstraat and Lombok.

Brussels has more to see and greater things to see. The gilded Grand-Place, the Royal Museums with Bruegel, Rubens and Magritte, and Horta's Art Nouveau houses in Saint-Gilles would each justify a visit on their own, with the Cinquantenaire museums and the Atomium on top. The drawback is a broken city fabric, with grand quarters next to office blocks.

Utrecht turns that the other way round. Its medieval centre is intact and very attractive, with the free-standing Dom Tower and the two-level Oudegracht. Its museums, the Centraal Museum's De Stijl collection and the small Rietveld Schröder House, are fine but modest in number.

Brussels gives the fuller evening out. Bars fill Saint-Géry and the streets around the Bourse, Place Flagey draws a local crowd, and century-old taverns pour strong ales late into the night. It also has a respected techno club in the Marolles and a queer scene around Rue du Marché au Charbon.

Utrecht's nights belong to its students: canal-side terraces, the Neude and the Janskerkhof, and a few clubs. It is a friendly scene but a small one, and locals after a big night tend to take the train to Amsterdam.

Both sit in flat, green country without real wilderness, so the difference is in how you get out into it. In Brussels it means walking or cycling in the Sonian Forest, a tall beech forest on the city's edge, and taking a longer trip to the Meuse and Ardennes valleys for hills and kayaking.

In Utrecht you go out by bike: along the Vecht past country estates and windmills, onto the heath and wooded ridges of the Utrechtse Heuvelrug, or north to sail on the Loosdrecht lakes.

These are two of the best day-trip bases in Europe, and the real choice is which country you want to see. From Brussels, Ghent, Bruges and Antwerp are each an hour or less away, Waterloo and Namur lie to the south, and high-speed trains put Paris within reach for a long day.

Utrecht sits at the hub of the Dutch railways, with Amsterdam under half an hour away and Rotterdam, The Hague, Delft and Gouda all close. Kinderdijk's windmills and the Kröller-Müller Museum round out a thorough tour of the Netherlands from one hotel.

Utrecht is the more relaxed city with children, though Brussels is not far behind. Utrecht's compact, calm centre, its Railway Museum in an old station and the Miffy museum for toddlers make days simple, and Kasteel de Haar adds a fairy-tale outing. The bikes streaming through the streets are the main thing to watch.

Brussels has bigger set pieces, with the Iguanodon hall at the Natural Sciences museum, the Atomium and Mini-Europe, and comic murals around the centre. Busy traffic, cobbles and rainy days make the logistics harder work.

Utrecht is the easier city to move around. You step out of Utrecht Centraal straight into the old town, and the Dom, the canals and most museums are a flat walk away. A rental bike covers the rest, so most visitors hardly need public transport.

The centre of Brussels is walkable too, but the climb from the lower town to the Royal Museums is steep and the pavements are rough. Its metro and trams reach Ixelles and Saint-Gilles well, while driving through its tunnels and one-way streets is best avoided.

Brussels has more worth buying and more variety. Master chocolatiers line the Galeries Royales and the Sablon, antiques dealers gather on the square, and the Jeu de Balle flea market in the Marolles rewards an early start. Rue Antoine Dansaert shows off Belgian designers, and Avenue Louise has the luxury labels that Utrecht lacks.

Utrecht's appeal is its small independent shops in streets like the Zadelstraat and Twijnstraat, plus the flower market on the Janskerkhof. Serious fashion shoppers end up in Amsterdam.

Neither is a budget destination, and the costs work out differently in each. In Brussels much of the hotel trade serves business travellers, so weekends are noticeably better value, and frites and the immigrant quarters keep meals cheap.

In Utrecht it works the other way: central rooms are scarce and weekends cost more. Once you have a bed, though, the walkable centre and a rental bike mean you spend almost nothing on getting around.

Brussels has the broader stage. La Monnaie, where an 1830 performance sparked the Belgian revolution, is known for adventurous opera, Bozar and Flagey host first-rate orchestras, and there is contemporary dance and theatre in both French and Dutch. The Queen Elisabeth Competition brings young classical talent every spring.

Utrecht does well for its size, with TivoliVredenburg stacking classical, pop and jazz under one roof and the Festival Oude Muziek drawing early-music lovers from across Europe. It has no opera house, though, and its theatre is mostly in Dutch.

Neither city has a bathing tradition, but Utrecht is the calmer place to slow down. Large Dutch sauna complexes, with steam rooms and outdoor pools, sit in the green belt around it. Once the day-trippers leave, quiet evenings on the canal wharves and the Pandhof cloister garden help you unwind.

Brussels has a few North African hammams and hotel spas, but a working capital's traffic and pace come with them. Its best rest is a long lunch or an afternoon on an Ixelles terrace.