Budapest or Salzburg?

Neither city has a beach, but Salzburg has better swimming. Fuschlsee, Wolfgangsee and Mondsee lie within about forty-five minutes. Their water is clear and green and surrounded by steep hills, and you get in from jetties and lawns. The water stays cooler than in the Hungarian lakes, though.

Budapest's swimming is mostly in lidos: big open-air pool complexes with lawns, on Margaret Island and in the outer districts. Shallow, warm Lake Velence is under an hour away by train, and Balaton is about two hours off, so it works best as an overnight trip rather than an afternoon dip.

Budapest is the better city for eating and drinking. Its cooking has more depth: goulash, fisherman's soup and lángos, the Great Market Hall for ingredients, and a serious modern restaurant scene. Its wine bars pour Tokaji, Eger reds and Balaton whites, a range Salzburg cannot match.

Salzburg's high points are the coffee houses, the Salzburger Nockerl and its beer gardens under chestnut trees. Too many old-town kitchens serve the same menus to tour groups, though, and the better inns are out in the suburbs and on the hills.

Budapest has more to see, and the sights are on a grander scale. Parliament, the Royal Palace and the Fishermen's Bastion face each other across the Danube. Behind them come the Museum of Fine Arts, the Dohány Street Synagogue, Art Nouveau buildings, Ottoman tombs and the communist statues of Memento Park. Seeing it properly takes several days.

Salzburg offers one compact, unified piece of Baroque. The cathedral, the Residenz, Hohensalzburg fortress and the Mozart houses are all within a few minutes' walk of each other, and two or three unhurried days will cover them.

The cities are very different after dark. Budapest has one of Central Europe's liveliest nights out: ruin bars in derelict courtyards, cocktail bars along Kazinczy and Király streets, summer garden bars and party boats on the Danube. The central streets can get rowdy at weekends.

In Salzburg, a typical evening means a concert, dinner and a litre of beer at a long wooden table. A few student pubs on Rudolfskai stay open late, but there are barely any clubs, and people who want a real night out take the train to Munich.

Salzburg is by far the better base for the outdoors. The Untersberg cable car climbs to about 1,800m for ridge walks, and paragliders launch from the Gaisberg. The Salzkammergut lakes and the Königssee fjord in Berchtesgaden are each well under an hour away, and the ski areas are about an hour's drive.

Budapest's outdoors is gentler. There are beech woods and lookout towers in the Buda Hills, caves carved by thermal water and a cycle path along the forested Danube Bend, but nothing you could call mountains.

Salzburg has the stronger day trips. Lakeside Hallstatt, with its prehistoric salt mine, the imperial spa town of Bad Ischl, the clifftop fortress at Werfen and Berchtesgaden across the border are all within reach, and Munich is about an hour and a half away by train. The catch is that several of the lake villages are much easier to reach with a hire car.

From Budapest, the Danube Bend towns of Szentendre, Visegrád and Esztergom are easy by train. Eger and Hollókő are about two hours out, and more of the good places need an overnight stay.

Both work well with children, but in different ways. Budapest offers bigger outings: the old zoo with its Art Nouveau animal houses, the Children's Railway run by schoolchildren, lidos with wave pools and the Palace of Wonders science centre. Trams make getting around with a pushchair easy.

Salzburg is smaller and calmer. The trick fountains at Hellbrunn and the wooden slides in the salt mines are the highlights, but the cobbled, steep lanes are hard work with a pushchair, and a couple of days uses up the city's attractions.

Budapest has the more complete public transport. Trams run along the embankment and around the Grand Boulevard, and there is a short metro whose oldest line runs under Andrássy Avenue, so a bigger city is easy to cover. Buda's steep hill has its own funicular.

Salzburg barely needs transport in the centre, since its main sights are within about fifteen minutes' walk of each other and trolleybuses handle the rest. The difficulty is getting out of town, because the regional buses to the lakes are slow.

Neither city is a shopping destination, but Budapest has a bit more variety. There are Herend and Zsolnay porcelain shops, Hungarian design boutiques in Districts V and VII, and communist-era finds at the Ecseri flea market.

Salzburg's speciality is Tracht. Workshops around the old town make dirndls and loden jackets to measure, and the Domplatz Christmas market draws visitors in Advent. Beyond that, the guild-signed Getreidegasse is mostly chain stores and souvenirs.

Budapest will cost you a good deal less. Transport, wine and ordinary coffee houses are cheap, and good mid-range rooms close to the centre are easy to find. Lunch menus in the residential districts cut costs further.

Salzburg is expensive for a city its size, especially for hotels near the old town and meals in the centre. During the summer festival and Advent, rooms become both scarce and much dearer. Staying across the river and buying the city card are the usual ways to save.

Classical music is excellent in both cities, but it works differently. Salzburg's year centres on its festivals: the summer festival in the Felsenreitschule and the Festspielhaus, Jedermann outside the cathedral, Mozart Week and Easter. Tickets for these have to be booked far ahead.

Budapest has music all year round with less fuss over tickets. There is opera on Andrássy Avenue, concerts in the Liszt Academy's Art Nouveau hall and at Müpa, plus operetta and folk dance. Its spoken theatre is in Hungarian, so visitors mostly come for the music.

This is Budapest's strongest point. The city sits on more than a hundred hot springs, and bathing is part of daily life: the neo-Baroque Széchenyi with its steaming outdoor pools, the mosaic halls of the Gellért, and Rudas and Király under their Ottoman domes.

Salzburg has no springs of its own. It relaxes you in other ways, with quiet river paths, the Mirabell gardens and the Paracelsus Bad. For real spa culture you have to go out of town, to the brine baths of Bad Reichenhall or the Gastein valley.