Fort Myers or Gulf Shores?

Gulf Shores has the better beach. Its soft white quartz sand runs unbroken from Fort Morgan to the Florida line, right in front of the condos, so the beach is the stay itself. In Fort Myers the sand is on barrier islands half an hour or more from town. Still, Fort Myers Beach, quiet Lovers Key and the shelling shores of Sanibel and Captiva each have their own character.

The water behaves differently too. The Gulf off Fort Myers is shallow and gentle, while rip currents off Alabama mean watching the beach flags. The seasons are also reversed: southwest Florida stays swimmable in winter, while Gulf Shores is a summer beach.

Both serve casual Gulf seafood with a water view, and neither has a real food culture of its own. Fort Myers has stone crab claws in season and a small group of independent restaurants and craft breweries in the River District, and the cooking improves towards Sanibel and Naples.

Gulf Shores leans towards Louisiana, with gumbo, chargrilled oysters and deep-water Royal Red shrimp. Many visitors buy shrimp at the seafood markets and cook it in their condo.

Fort Myers has much more to see. The riverside winter homes, laboratory and gardens of Edison and Ford fill a good half day, and McGregor Boulevard's royal palms and the early twentieth-century brick streets of the River District give the town some sense of its past.

Gulf Shores has essentially one sight: Fort Morgan, the brick star fort that played its part in the Battle of Mobile Bay. Beyond that there is just a small local museum, so anyone curious about history has to drive out for the day.

Neither is a place for a big night out, but the evenings feel different. In Fort Myers, downtown has rooftop and cocktail bars and a monthly art walk, the beach pier draws the sunset crowd, and much of the winter crowd is older and goes home early.

Gulf Shores is all open-air beach-bar decks with sand underfoot. Its best-known spot is the state-line roadhouse at Perdido Key, which stays loud late into the night.

Fort Myers is better for wildlife. The Ding Darling refuge on Sanibel is a first-rate place to see roseate spoonbills and herons. Corkscrew Swamp's boardwalk goes through old-growth bald cypress, the Great Calusa Blueway leads into mangrove tunnels, and manatees gather on the Orange River in winter.

Gulf Shores is more about cycling and fishing. Gulf State Park has paved trails through maritime forest, Bon Secour's dune trails fill with migrating birds in spring and autumn, and boats leave Orange Beach for deep-sea fishing. The Mobile-Tensaw Delta is its wildest country, but it lies farther inland.

The day trips are about equal, and both need a car. From Fort Myers you can visit polished Naples, the Ringling museum and Ca' d'Zan in Sarasota, sleepy Boca Grande, or Everglades City at the edge of the Ten Thousand Islands.

Gulf Shores looks towards the old Gulf Coast instead. Mobile has ironwork balconies and the USS Alabama, Fairhope has its bayside pier, Pensacola has its historic district and naval aviation museum, and a car ferry crosses the bay to Dauphin Island.

Gulf Shores does more for children. Families are its main business, so rainy or very hot afternoons have a water park, a small hands-on zoo, a Ferris wheel on the Orange Beach waterfront and a theme park in Foley. The catch is rip currents, so watch children in the surf.

Fort Myers has gentler water and simpler pleasures: shell-hunting on Sanibel, dolphins and manatees, an easy paddle through the mangroves, and spring-training baseball in March. It has no theme park or zoo, though, and Orlando is a long drive.

You need a car in both, and neither has buses worth relying on. In Fort Myers the town, beaches and reserves are spread across a wide county, and winter traffic builds up on the bridges to Sanibel and the beach. Gulf Shores runs along one long beach road. There the traffic is worst on summer weekends, but the trails in Gulf State Park are good by bike.

Fort Myers is the better place to browse. On Sanibel's Periwinkle Way and in the Captiva villages you will find galleries and shell shops, the River District has a few independent stores, and there is an outlet mall towards Estero.

In Gulf Shores, shopping mostly means huge beachwear and souvenir stores and surf and fishing shops. The Foley outlet mall is where people go on a wet day.

Overall costs are similar, but the expensive months are opposite. Fort Myers is dearest from about January to April, especially on Sanibel, and gets much cheaper in summer, although the causeway and some beach parking charge fees.

Gulf Shores is most expensive in June and July and cheap in winter, which is why long winter stays there are common. Free beach access and a condo kitchen help keep everyday costs down.

Fort Myers has a real winter season. The Barbara B. Mann Performing Arts Hall brings touring Broadway musicals, a professional repertory company plays in a restored 1908 theatre, and a regional symphony gives concerts, though most of it stops in summer.

Gulf Shores has no theatre or classical music. Live music means bands on beach-bar stages, the long-running songwriters' festival at the state-line roadhouse every November, and touring country and rock acts at the Orange Beach amphitheatre.

Neither has a spa or bathing tradition, so in both places relaxing means a pool, a resort massage and the sea. Fort Myers has the slightly calmer setting, thanks to the low buildings, bike paths and early nights of Sanibel and Captiva. In Gulf Shores the quiet comes from slow days on a condo balcony at sunset, with a few day spas.