Heidelberg or Paris?

Neither city is a beach destination, so in both you are looking at somewhere to cool off rather than a seaside. Heidelberg's options are its outdoor pools and the flooded gravel-pit lakes on the Rhine plain, about half an hour away, which feel green and rural.

Paris keeps its swimming in the city: riverbanks laid with sand in summer, the Bassin de la Villette and handsome Art Deco pools. It also has the closer coast, with the Channel at Deauville about two hours away by train, although the water there is cool.

Heidelberg eats heartily and drinks well: Schäufele, Maultaschen and spring asparagus, with Riesling and Pinot from the Bergstrasse vineyards on the edge of town. The better meals are in Neuenheim and in village wine taverns, not on the Hauptstrasse, and the choice is that of a small city.

Paris is one of the great eating cities, and you notice it at every level, from the neighbourhood boulangerie and the Marché d'Aligre to haute cuisine, natural-wine bars and pho in the 13th. A trip planned around food has far more to explore there.

Heidelberg's sights form one compact and very beautiful set: the castle ruin, the Old Bridge, the baroque Altstadt and Germany's oldest university, with the graffiti-covered Student Prison. It takes a day or two to see, and the setting does a lot of the work.

Paris works on another scale. The Louvre, the Orsay, the Sainte-Chapelle and a long run of museums that would each be the main draw in a smaller city can fill a week without repeating themselves, and the Haussmann boulevards and the townhouses of the Marais are sights in their own right.

Heidelberg's nights belong to its students. Small pubs line the Untere Strasse and old taverns have carved tables, all busy in term and quiet early otherwise, so a proper club night means a train to Mannheim or Frankfurt.

Paris has the whole night out on its doorstep: wine bars, bottles on the canal banks, the bars of Oberkampf and Belleville, cocktails in South Pigalle, the Marais gay scene and clubs playing house and techno until dawn.

Heidelberg has the edge because the woods start where the town ends. The Philosophers' Walk, the funicular up the Königstuhl at 568m and the Celtic ramparts on the Heiligenberg are all within reach of the Altstadt, and the Neckar cycle path and the Palatinate Forest take you further.

Paris has fine parks in the Buttes-Chaumont and the Bois de Boulogne and Bois de Vincennes, and the boulders and oak woods of Fontainebleau are forty minutes away by train. In Paris, though, green space is somewhere you travel to rather than step into.

Both make strong bases, but Paris has the longer and grander list. Versailles, Chartres, Giverny, Reims with its Champagne houses, Rouen and the Loire châteaux via Tours can fill many days, much of it by fast train.

Heidelberg's outings are smaller and closer together: the Romanesque cathedral at Speyer, the palace gardens at Schwetzingen, Worms, the monastery at Maulbronn and the castle villages up the Neckar, with Strasbourg possible on a long day.

Heidelberg is small, safe and simple with children, with the funicular, a fairy-tale park on the Königstuhl, a compact zoo and the Technik Museum Speyer nearby. Paris comes out ahead because it offers far more to do: Disneyland and Parc Astérix, the Cité des Sciences, the Jardin d'Acclimatation and the carousels and toy boats in the Luxembourg.

What you pay for that in Paris is day-to-day friction, with metro stairs, crowded trains and small hotel rooms. In Heidelberg the main nuisance is pushing a pushchair over the cobbled, sloping Altstadt.

Heidelberg's sights lie along one long strip you can walk, with a tram in from the distant station and a single fare system that makes Speyer or the Neckar valley easy. Its drawbacks are the cobbles and the steep climb to the castle.

Paris goes further on both counts. It has a walking centre where the stroll from the Louvre to the Eiffel Tower is part of the pleasure, and a metro dense enough that a station is never far away. Stairs, rush-hour crush and pickpockets are the downside.

Shopping in Heidelberg means one long pedestrian street, with high-street chains at one end and cuckoo clocks and Studentenkuss chocolates at the other. Bergstrasse wine is the best thing to bring home.

Paris is a reason to travel in itself: couture flagships on Avenue Montaigne, Galeries Lafayette and Le Bon Marché, independent designers in the Marais, the old covered passages, the Saint-Ouen flea market and the bouquinistes along the Seine.

Heidelberg is the cheaper of the two, though not a bargain. Rooms are scarce and pricey at busy times, so many visitors stay in Mannheim, but student cafés and the regional travel ticket keep everything else reasonable.

Paris costs clearly more for rooms, drinks on a terrace and full-price museum tickets. Bakeries, markets, the free city museums and plenty of walking soften the bill, but the gap remains.

For a town of its size, Heidelberg does well. The municipal theatre stages opera and drama, the Heidelberger Frühling festival brings chamber music in spring, and in summer there are performances in the castle courtyard. Mannheim's larger house is twenty minutes away by train.

Paris is one of the world's great cities for the stage: ballet at the Palais Garnier, opera at the Bastille, the Philharmonie, the Comédie-Française, cellar jazz clubs and cabaret in Pigalle. Much of the theatre is in French, but music and dance need no translation.

Neither city is a wellness destination, and the rest each offers is different in kind. Heidelberg has nothing thermal in town, but there are warm saline baths in the Kraichgau within half an hour and Baden-Baden about an hour south, plus quiet forest paths and evenings on the Neckar meadows.

Paris offers steam rather than springs, in the tiled hammam of the Grande Mosquée and smaller neighbourhood hammams, along with hotel spas. Rest there comes in short pauses, an hour on a terrace or a chair in the Luxembourg gardens, in a loud and fast-moving city.