Burgas or Sofia?

This is where the two differ most. Burgas has a long town beach of dark, soft sand below the Sea Garden, quieter sands at Sarafovo and Kraimorie, and a whole coast of bays and resorts within an hour.

Sofia is inland on a high plain, so summer swimming there means park pools or the lake at Pancharevo. If you want the sea on a Sofia trip, plan separate nights on the coast, and Burgas is one of the natural places to spend them.

The two eat at about the same level. Both serve Bulgarian cooking and both are better for good, simple meals than for a food-focused trip. The difference is the sea: in Burgas you go for fried sprats, grilled bluefish, turbot and mussels at plain harbour and beach places, with Pomorie wine alongside.

Sofia leans to the grill and the clay pot, with kebapche, kyufte and slow-baked dishes in mehana taverns, sometimes with folk music. It also has more variety of setting, with small modern bistros around Vitosha Boulevard and wine bars pouring Mavrud and Melnik.

Sofia is far richer. Its centre packs Roman Serdica, the Rotunda of St George, a mosque and several great churches into a short walk, led by the gold domes of Alexander Nevsky. Boyana Church and the Thracian gold in the National Museum of History give it real depth.

Burgas is mostly a modern port. The highlights are the Sea Garden, the boat trip to St Anastasia Island and the Roman and Ottoman baths at Aquae Calidae, and two days covers them all.

Sofia has the livelier evenings, and it has them all year. Small cocktail bars, craft beer pubs and wine bars crowd the streets around Shishman, cellar bars under old buildings fill with students, and a few clubs play electronic music.

Burgas only gets busy at night in summer, when the Sea Garden beach bars and the streets around Aleksandrovska stay open late. After the season it goes quiet. If you want an all-night resort party rather than bar-hopping, Sunny Beach is forty minutes up the coast.

Sofia has the stronger outdoors by some way because it has mountains. Vitosha rises above 2,200m at the edge of the city, with spruce forest, boulder rivers and the walk to Cherni Vrah, and the Rila lakes and the ski slopes of Borovets lie further out.

Burgas is flat but has its own speciality. Its four lagoons lie on the Via Pontica migration route, where storks and pelicans pass in late summer and autumn and flamingos feed in the salt pans. Add easy cycling, kitesurfing and the oak and beech hills of Strandzha.

Both have good day trips, but of different kinds. From Burgas they run along the coast to the medieval churches of Nessebar, the wooden old quarter of Sozopol, and the salt museum and Thracian tomb at Pomorie, all within about forty minutes.

Sofia's trips go inland and take longer. Rila Monastery in its mountain valley and Plovdiv, with its Roman theatre and painted houses, are each about two hours away. The revival village of Koprivshtitsa makes a quieter outing. Plovdiv is an easy day from Sofia but too far from Burgas.

Burgas is the easier family choice in summer because the sea does most of the work. The sand is soft, the warm water shelves gently, and the shade and playgrounds of the Sea Garden are right beside the beach. The centre is flat and easy with a pushchair, and the water parks are up the coast in the resorts.

Sofia has big parks, a hands-on science centre and a good gondola day on Vitosha. It has few attractions made for children, though, and broken pavements make pushchairs hard work.

Both are easy to get around, in different ways. Burgas is small and flat, with the station, the pedestrian streets and the Sea Garden all within walking distance and the airport close by. The catch is the coast buses, which fill up in high summer, and you need a car for the lakes and Strandzha.

Sofia has a compact centre you can walk, plus a clean, simple metro from the airport through the middle, with trams and buses for everything else. You don't need a car in the city. Cracked pavements and Cyrillic signs away from the centre take some getting used to.

Neither is a shopping destination, but Sofia offers more. Vitosha Boulevard is a pedestrian high street with the mountain at its end, craft shops sell Troyan pottery and embroidery, and a flea market of icons sits by Alexander Nevsky.

Burgas has chains on Aleksandrovska and Bogoridi and a couple of malls. The things worth taking home are edible or practical: Pomorie salt, honey and local wine.

Both are very cheap by Western European standards, and over a week the difference is small. The timing is what differs. Burgas is inexpensive for most of the year, but rooms fill up and cost more in July and August, which is exactly when most people want the beach.

Sofia's costs stay low all year. Central hotels, mehana meals and metro rides are well below Western levels, and outings to Vitosha or Rila add little to the bill.

What separates the two stages is scale and season. Burgas has a respectable regional scene for a city its size: the State Opera and the philharmonic perform through the season, and in summer open-air festivals fill the Sea Garden. Beyond those, most stage work is in Bulgarian, and the living folk music and nestinari fire-dancing are found in the Strandzha villages.

Sofia offers a much bigger programme for most of the year. It has the National Opera and Ballet, the Sofia Philharmonic at Bulgaria Hall and big concerts at the National Palace of Culture. Orthodox choral singing is the most distinctive thing to hear, and there is a good evening on stage to be had in almost any month.

Burgas has the edge for relaxing. Its speciality is the black, salty mud of the Atanasovsko and Pomorie lakes, used for wraps in sanatoria or simply smeared on at the shore. There are hot springs at the northern edge of the city that have been used since Roman times, and the spa hotels of Pomorie are close by.

Sofia also sits on mineral springs, but in the city they mostly mean public taps beside the old Central Mineral Baths. For actual bathing you go to the pools on the outskirts or to Bankya, half an hour west. Day to day, relaxing in Sofia means park walks and long café afternoons.