Carmel-by-the-Sea or Laguna Beach?

This is where the two towns part company. Carmel Beach is a lovely sweep of white sand under the cypresses, but the water stays cold, the surf is strong and the coves to the south are dangerous. A visit means a sunset walk on the sand and a swim in the hotel pool.

Laguna is built around swimming. It has a string of small coves, from Crescent Bay and Shaw's Cove to Victoria Beach and Aliso, with clear water for snorkelling and lifeguards on the main beaches, and by late summer the sea is warm enough for a real swim. The price is steep stairways down to the sand and crowded summer weekends.

Neither town is a food destination in its own right, and the difference is one of style more than standard. Carmel is more formal: candlelit French and Italian dining rooms, Dungeness crab and sand dabs from the bay, and tasting rooms pouring Santa Lucia Highlands Pinot Noir.

Laguna is more relaxed, with fish tacos and poke near the sand, breakfast cafés full of surfers and clifftop dining rooms where the sunset does much of the work. Both towns are short on cheap and international food, and for either you need the car: from Carmel to Monterey and Seaside, from Laguna inland to the Vietnamese, Mexican and Korean kitchens of Orange County.

Both are small former art colonies with about a morning's worth of sights, but the sights are different. Carmel has the stronger single monument in Mission San Carlos Borromeo, where Junípero Serra is buried, along with its storybook cottages and Tor House, the granite home Robinson Jeffers built by hand.

Laguna has the museum Carmel lacks, the Laguna Art Museum with its focus on California art, and long rows of galleries along Coast Highway. Its nearest mission, at San Juan Capistrano, is outside town.

Carmel ends the day with a glass in a tasting room and a long dinner, perhaps a nightcap in a hotel lounge, and the streets are silent by ten.

Laguna is no place for a big night out either, but there is more going on after dinner. Its old beach bars, dive bars and terrace lounges fill up on summer weekends, even if the town is still quiet well before midnight, and the livelier bars of Newport Beach and Costa Mesa are a short drive up the coast.

Both have fine coastal landscapes, but Carmel's are on another scale. Point Lobos is five minutes away, with sea otters, harbour seals and wind-bent cypresses on granite headlands. Beyond it run the Big Sur cliffs, Bixby Bridge and the redwoods of Pfeiffer Big Sur, and Monterey Bay adds kayaking among otters and kelp-forest diving.

Laguna's strengths are gentler and more about the water. Its whole coast is a marine protected area, good for tide pooling and shore diving. Inland are the chaparral canyons of Laguna Coast Wilderness and Aliso and Wood Canyons, and on clear days you can see Catalina from Top of the World. It is good outdoor country, just not Big Sur.

Laguna has far more within a day's drive. Mission San Juan Capistrano is twenty minutes inland, Catalina Island is a ferry ride from Dana Point, and both San Diego and Los Angeles work as days out, with the Temecula vineyards inland as well.

From Carmel the easy outings are close and fairly modest: Monterey's Cannery Row and adobe buildings, Victorian Pacific Grove, the tasting rooms of Carmel Valley and Steinbeck country around Salinas. San Francisco is far enough away to make a tiring day.

Laguna is the easier base for families. Children get lifeguarded beaches with water warm enough to play in, tide pools, the Main Beach playground and a free trolley, and Disneyland and Knott's Berry Farm are about forty minutes away.

Carmel is quiet and safe but made for adults, and its cold, rough sea rules out paddling. Its strongest card is the Monterey Bay Aquarium fifteen minutes away. Together with the Point Lobos tide pools, it suits school-age children who would rather watch otters than go on rides.

In both towns you can walk the centre and need a car for everything else. Carmel's square-mile grid is compact but steep, the residential lanes have no street lights, buses are thin, and Point Lobos, Big Sur and the aquarium all mean driving.

Laguna is longer and hillier, and many coves are reached by stairs. But its free trolley along Coast Highway links the northern and southern beaches, which Carmel has nothing to match. In both towns, parking is a struggle in summer.

Both towns are full of galleries selling plein-air landscapes, but Laguna has more to buy. Besides the gallery row on Coast Highway and the boutiques of Forest Avenue, its summer art festivals sell crafts straight from the makers, and the big luxury malls of Newport Beach and Costa Mesa are half an hour away.

Carmel's courtyards of cashmere, jewellery and homeware make a pleasant afternoon of browsing, but there is no market, and for serious shopping you drive to the outlets around Monterey.

You save nothing by choosing one over the other. Both are among the priciest small towns on the California coast, with luxury inns, expensive dinners and little cheap food. The ways round it are the same too: the beach, the trails and the coastal walks are free, and budget travellers sleep elsewhere and drive in, to Carmel from Monterey or Seaside and to Laguna from inland Orange County.

Carmel's arts calendar is distinguished but leans on summer: Baroque concerts at the Carmel Bach Festival, plays under the pines at the Forest Theater and the Monterey Jazz Festival next door each September. Out of season, the Sunset Center keeps a thinner programme of touring musicians and speakers going.

Laguna offers more across the year. On summer evenings in Laguna Canyon the Pageant of the Masters sets live performers in recreations of famous artworks, a show found nowhere else. The Laguna Playhouse stages plays and musicals in every season, and Costa Mesa's large arts centre for opera, symphony and touring Broadway is half an hour away.

Neither town has a bathing culture, so in both the calm itself is the treatment, and the spas are in expensive resorts. The mood is different. Carmel is misty and still, with dark nights, made for fireside rooms in village inns and spa days at Pebble Beach or in sunny Carmel Valley.

Laguna is sunnier and more active, with yoga and meditation studios in the village, morning walks along the cliffs and ocean-view spas in the resorts on the bluffs, and days that end with long sunsets over the water.