Cocoa Beach or Pensacola?

Both are long, sandy barrier-island beaches, but the water is different. Cocoa Beach faces the open Atlantic, with firm pale sand, greenish water and steady small waves that make it a surfing town. The sand also starts a few streets from almost every room.

Pensacola's Santa Rosa Island has whiter quartz sand, clearer green Gulf water and usually gentler surf, plus calm, shallow water on the sound side for toddlers. It does lie about twenty minutes from downtown over the bridges. Neither is warm enough for swimming in winter, but the Atlantic off Cocoa Beach stays a few degrees milder than the Gulf.

Pensacola eats better. Chargrilled oysters, royal red shrimp and Creole-tinged gumbo at waterfront places on the bay are a step above Cocoa Beach's beach grills, dockside fish houses and roadside chains. So are the modern Southern restaurants, breweries and Saturday market around Palafox Street. Cocoa Beach's rock shrimp and fish tacos are good after a surf, but they rarely make an evening out.

This is where the two part company. Cocoa Beach has the pier, the beach and one extraordinary spectacle, a rocket rising from Cape Canaveral, watched from the sand. For museums you have to leave town.

Pensacola has five flags' worth of history. There are the restored houses of the Seville district around Plaza Ferdinand, the brick bulk of Fort Pickens on Santa Rosa Island, and the National Naval Aviation Museum, whose aircraft can fill a day on their own. The museum's place on an active air station means ID checks, but together these sights give two or three days of sightseeing that Cocoa Beach cannot offer.

Pensacola gives you more of an evening. Palafox Street and the Seville Quarter group pubs, cocktail bars, rooftop terraces and taprooms within walking distance of each other, full at weekends with locals and young Navy personnel. The sand-floored island bars and the roadhouse on the state line at Perdido Key add a rowdier summer side.

In Cocoa Beach, going out means a covers band on a deck near the pier. It gets livelier at spring break but is over early most nights. Neither has a club scene, and from Cocoa Beach that means a drive to Orlando.

Both are flat, watery landscapes with plenty to do outdoors, but the wildlife and activities differ. Cocoa Beach backs onto the Indian River Lagoon, where you paddle among manatees and dolphins and, on summer nights, through bioluminescent plankton. Merritt Island's refuge has alligators and winter birds, and the ocean side has surf breaks suited to learners.

Pensacola's outdoors means the dunes and maritime forest of the Gulf Islands National Seashore, with a bike path running through them. Offshore there is wreck diving on a sunken aircraft carrier, and inland you can canoe or go tubing on the clear Blackwater River. Divers and river paddlers should head west, while surfers and anyone hoping to see manatees should head east.

Cocoa Beach has the better day trips, largely because of one place: the Kennedy Space Center, half an hour north, with the Saturn V and the shuttle Atlantis. Orlando's theme parks and Winter Park's museums are an hour inland, and St Augustine's Spanish fort makes a long but worthwhile day.

From Pensacola the best trip is Mobile, an hour west, for its antebellum streets and the battleship on the bay, with Fairhope and Fort Morgan close by. The drives east to Destin, Seaside and Rosemary Beach mostly lead to more beaches.

Cocoa Beach gives children more to look forward to. Rockets, the space centre and a day at Orlando's theme parks are hard to beat. The lifeguarded beaches in the town parks are close to the condos, though the Atlantic currents need watching.

Pensacola is calmer in the water, with sheltered sound-side shallows for toddlers. It has its own aircraft appeal in the aviation museum and the Blue Angels, plus the zoo, the lighthouse climb and the tunnels at Fort Pickens. What it lacks is a headline attraction within easy reach.

Both are car destinations. Cocoa Beach is one long strip, so the beach is a short walk and the downtown and pier are a bike ride, but the space centre, the refuge and the airport an hour away in Orlando all need a car. Pensacola is more spread out, with the beach, downtown and the air station separated by bridges and highways, though its historic centre is pleasant on foot and a trolley runs along the beach strip in season.

Neither is a shopping destination, but Pensacola has a little more variety: independent boutiques and antique shops on Palafox Street, crafts at the Saturday market and a regional mall. Cocoa Beach is almost all surf shops, led by Ron Jon, the round-the-clock landmark that has sold boards and beachwear since the 1960s. For anything else you cross to Cocoa Village or drive to Orlando.

Costs are similar, moderate for a US beach trip, and both need a hire car in the budget. Pensacola has a few more ways to save, with cheaper rooms inland and in town, a free naval aviation museum, a national seashore that costs little, and island prices that drop sharply out of season.

At Cocoa Beach, motels and older condos are the economical beds. The space centre ticket and the Orlando park admissions push up a week's spend, though, and launch weekends raise room rates.

Pensacola has a real stage. The restored 1925 Saenger Theatre downtown is home to the local symphony, opera and ballet and also hosts touring shows, and a long-running community theatre fills out the season.

At Cocoa Beach, live performance means cover bands on beach-bar decks. There is a playhouse in Cocoa Village and a performing arts centre in Melbourne a drive away, but serious concert-goers end up in Orlando.

Neither has a spa culture, and both offer only day spas and massage studios, so the difference is in how you unwind. Cocoa Beach offers dawn walks on the sand, beach yoga and sunsets over the Banana River, with proper spa resorts only around Orlando. Pensacola is calmest out of season, on the island and the quiet stretches of Perdido Key, and its larger beach hotels have their own day spas.