Durango, Colorado or Santa Fe?

Neither is a place for a beach day, since both sit high and far inland. Durango keeps the water closer, with inner tubes floating the Animas right through the centre and Lake Nighthorse just outside town. In Santa Fe a swim usually means a hotel pool, and Abiquiu Lake or the Rio Grande make an outing of an hour or so.

Santa Fe has the more distinctive table. New Mexican cooking, with red or green chile, blue corn and posole, is a cuisine in its own right. It is served in old adobe rooms around the Plaza, and the town adds a fine-dining tier and one of the country's oldest farmers' markets in the Railyard.

Durango eats well in a simpler way: green-chile plates, steaks, big breakfasts and some careful cooking with Colorado lamb and trout. Its real strength is beer, with more craft taprooms than a town its size usually has. Neither offers much cooking from further afield.

Santa Fe is far richer for sightseeing. The adobe streets, the Palace of the Governors on the Plaza, the old chapels and the folk art and Native American collections on Museum Hill easily fill two or three days. Canyon Road and the O'Keeffe Museum add art on top.

Durango's history is younger and narrower. It is a railway town founded in 1880, and its heart is the steam locomotives, the roundhouse museum and the Victorian brick main street. The college's Southwestern collection is worth seeing, but a morning covers the town, and its great ancient sites lie out at Mesa Verde.

Both are early towns where dancing barely exists and the streets are quiet before midnight. The difference is the setting. A Durango evening means a pint in a brewery taproom or an old saloon with a piano player, among cyclists and rafters. In Santa Fe it means a long dinner, then a margarita on a rooftop facing the sunset over the Jemez Mountains, with Albuquerque an hour away for anyone wanting more.

Both have serious mountains at the edge of town, but Durango's give active travellers more. The San Juans reach above 4,000m in the Weminuche Wilderness. Singletrack starts from the streets, the Colorado Trail begins just north, rafters run the Animas through the centre, and a full ski resort is half an hour away.

Santa Fe makes up some of the gap with variety. The Sangre de Cristo foothills and the Pecos Wilderness give alpine hiking, and to the west lies desert country: the red cliffs around Abiquiu, the grassland of Valles Caldera and the Rio Grande Gorge.

Both are bases for exploring the ancestral Puebloan country by car, and Santa Fe has the slightly longer list. The High Road runs through old Spanish villages to Taos Pueblo, which has been lived in for a thousand years. In other directions lie Bandelier's cliff dwellings, Los Alamos, Pecos and O'Keeffe's Ghost Ranch.

Durango has fewer outings, but one of them is among the finest in the region: the cliff dwellings of Mesa Verde. The steam train up the Animas canyon to Silverton, the ruins at Aztec and the springs at Pagosa round out a full week.

Durango is the easier choice with children. The steam train, tubing and gentle rafting on the river, and the summer ziplines and alpine coaster at the ski resort make it feel like an outdoor playground. Mesa Verde's ladders turn history into an adventure.

Santa Fe is just as safe and relaxed, but its days revolve around galleries and long dinners. A children's museum, the toys at the folk art museum and Bandelier's ladders help, though it suits older children best. In both towns the altitude can tire small children at first.

Both centres are compact, and both need a hire car beyond them. Santa Fe's walkable core is larger, linking the Plaza, Canyon Road, the downtown museums and the Railyard, and the Rail Runner train reaches Albuquerque without a car. Durango's centre is a fifteen-minute stroll along Main Avenue with a good riverside path for walkers and cyclists, but trailheads, the ski area and Mesa Verde all mean driving.

Santa Fe is one of the country's serious places to buy Native American and Southwestern art. Artists sell silver, turquoise and pottery directly under the portal of the Palace of the Governors. Canyon Road and the Railyard are thick with galleries, and the summer Indian, Spanish and Folk Art markets draw collectors from far away.

Durango's Main Avenue is a smaller version of this, with turquoise and rugs among Western boots and souvenirs, plus outdoor shops for bike and fishing gear. Neither town has fashion or luxury shopping.

Neither is cheap, and both need a hire car, but Durango is a little easier on the wallet. It costs less than Colorado's famous ski towns, and rooms are cheaper in spring and late autumn. Santa Fe prices its Plaza hotels, restaurants and galleries for a well-off crowd, especially during the markets and the opera, although staying out on Cerrillos Road helps.

Santa Fe has much the stronger stage, centred on its summer opera. Performances in the open-sided theatre start as the sun sets over the desert, and the festival is known for new and rarely staged works. A chamber music festival, a long flamenco tradition and touring shows at the historic Lensic add to it.

Durango's offer is smaller and folksier: a summer classical festival, the college concert hall, a Victorian melodrama and a chuckwagon supper show. Both are quiet in winter, Durango more so.

For unwinding the two are evenly matched, in different ways. In Durango you soak in mineral pools after exercise, with spring-fed pools just north of town and Pagosa Springs and Ouray further out. Santa Fe has a more cultivated slow-living side: onsen-style tubs in the pines, plenty of spas, yoga studios and healers for its size, and the historic springs at Ojo Caliente an hour north.