Carmel-by-the-Sea or San Jose?

Neither town is a place to swim, and the real difference is where the sand is. Carmel Beach, a long curve of fine white sand at the foot of Ocean Avenue, is a walk from your inn for sunrise or sunset. The water is cold and the surf is strong, though, and Monastery and Carmel River beaches are dangerous to go into.

From San Jose the beach means a drive over the Santa Cruz Mountains, and that drive is slow on summer weekends. Santa Cruz and Capitola are sunnier and more sheltered, with a proper beach-town feel, but there too it is wetsuits or sitting on the sand.

San Jose has the wider choice. It has one of the largest Vietnamese communities in the United States, along with serious taquerias and Indian and Korean cooking on the roads towards Santa Clara. The catch is that the best of it is spread across suburban plazas, so eating well means driving.

Carmel is the opposite. It has refined French and Italian dining rooms, Dungeness crab and sand dabs from the bay, and Pinot Noir from the Santa Lucia Highlands, all within a square mile you can walk. But there is little that is cheap, casual or from outside Europe and California, and dinner finishes early.

San Jose has a little more to see, and more variety. There is the eccentric Winchester Mystery House, Egyptian antiquities at the Rosicrucian museum, and the Computer History Museum on Silicon Valley's own story.

Carmel's strength is one sight of real stature, the stone basilica of the mission where Junípero Serra is buried. Beyond that there is Robinson Jeffers' hand-built Tor House and the 1920s cottages of the village itself. Neither place fills more than a couple of days.

Carmel's evenings end at the dinner table or in a wine bar, and the streets are quiet by ten. San Jose has a real night out, if a modest one: pubs, beer halls and a covered food market at San Pedro Square, and cocktail bars, dive bars and a few dance clubs along South First Street in SoFA, busiest at weekends. Neither keeps going into the small hours.

Carmel sits right on the coastline that San Jose drives to. Point Lobos is five minutes away, with harbour seals, sea otters and passing grey whales in winter and spring. Bixby Bridge and the redwood canyons of Pfeiffer Big Sur are within an hour.

San Jose's outdoors is inland and wooded. It has the redwood groves at Big Basin and Henry Cowell, ridge trails at Castle Rock, foothill preserves on the city's edge and the climb up Mount Hamilton, all good for hikers and road cyclists. Those cypress headlands, though, are an hour and a half away.

San Jose is the better hub. San Francisco is about an hour away by Caltrain, Stanford and Palo Alto are closer still, and Berkeley is across the bay. Santa Cruz, Monterey and even Napa and Sonoma are all within a day's reach.

From Carmel the short trips are pleasant but local: Cannery Row and the old adobes of Monterey, Pacific Grove, the tasting rooms of Carmel Valley and Steinbeck's Salinas. San Francisco is about two and a half hours away, which makes for a long, tiring day.

San Jose gives children more to do. There are rides at Great America in Santa Clara, the small zoo at Happy Hollow, a children's discovery museum and an IMAX dome downtown, and suburban hotels with pools.

Carmel is better suited to school-age children who like wildlife. There are tide pools at Point Lobos and the Monterey Bay Aquarium is fifteen minutes away, but there are no rides, and the cold, rough sea rules out paddling.

You need a car in both places to see much, but they differ in what you can do without one. Carmel is a village about a square mile across that you can walk, though the hill down to the beach is steep and the residential lanes are unlit at night. Buses are thin, and Point Lobos, Big Sur and the wineries all mean driving.

San Jose has a flat, walkable downtown, light rail running north and south, and Caltrain to San Francisco. Carmel has nothing to match those links. Even so, San Jose's sights are scattered across a valley of freeways and rush-hour traffic.

San Jose is the better place for serious shopping. On the west side, a very large regional mall and an open-air street of boutiques cover most international and luxury brands, and Japantown and the Asian supermarkets are worth a browse. Carmel is for browsing more than buying: galleries of coastal painting and photography, and small courtyard boutiques selling cashmere and jewellery. It is polished, expensive and done in an afternoon.

Both are expensive, but Carmel is the steeper of the two. Its rooms are mostly boutique inns priced as luxury all year round, and cheap food barely exists. The usual way to save is to sleep in Monterey or Seaside and drive in.

San Jose's hotels are priced for business travel, so they get cheaper at weekends, and the Vietnamese and Mexican eateries in the suburban plazas give fair value. Car hire, fuel and parking still add up.

For a village, Carmel has a surprising amount on stage, though nearly all of it is in summer. The Bach Festival has filled the season with Baroque concerts since 1935, many of them at the Sunset Center, and the Forest Theater puts on plays and musicals outdoors among the pines. Each September the Monterey Jazz Festival brings its crowd to the area. Outside those months there is little beyond community theatre and the odd concert.

San Jose has a little more on, and it spreads its programme across the year. Opera San José performs in the restored California Theatre, a 1920s movie palace, and the symphony and touring Broadway shows share the Center for the Performing Arts. The arena takes the big touring concerts, and a summer jazz festival fills the downtown streets. For a city this large, though, an ordinary weeknight offers little, and anyone after serious theatre heads to San Francisco.

Carmel is the more restful place, and that comes from its pace: misty mornings, still evenings, spas at the Pebble Beach lodges and Carmel Valley resorts, and in-room treatments at the village inns. San Jose is built around the working week. Still, its nearby Korean-style bathhouses offer the saunas and soaking pools Carmel lacks, and the Japanese gardens at Hakone and Kelley Park are good for a quiet hour.