Huntington Beach or Santa Fe?

This is the widest gap between the two. Huntington Beach is a beach town in the full sense, with about 14km of flat sand, volleyball nets, fire rings and lifeguard towers all along the front. The Pacific stays cool for much of the year, though, and rip currents mean swimming near the towers.

Santa Fe is landlocked on a high plateau. A summer swim means a drive to a reservoir such as Abiquiu Lake or a float on the Rio Grande, and for most visitors it simply means the hotel pool.

Santa Fe has the more distinctive food. New Mexican cooking, with red or green chile, blue corn and posole, is a cuisine you cannot really eat anywhere else. The town also supports a fine-dining tier and one of the oldest farmers' markets in the country.

Huntington Beach eats casually: fish tacos by the pier, surfers' breakfasts, brewpubs with ocean views and plenty of chains. Its best food is a short drive inland in Little Saigon. That gives it more variety than Santa Fe within reach, but less character in the town itself.

Here Santa Fe is in another league. Its low adobe centre, the Palace of the Governors, the old chapels and the museums on Museum Hill fill two or three full days.

In Huntington Beach, sightseeing means surf culture: the pier, the International Surfing Museum and the handprints at the foot of Main Street. Visitors who want museums drive to Los Angeles.

Neither city is a destination for a big night, but Huntington Beach has more going on. On weekends, the sports bars, rooftop decks and few dance spots on Main Street fill with a young local crowd, and summer nights can get loud.

In Santa Fe the evening centres on a long dinner, then a margarita or mezcal with a view of the sunset. There are a few breweries in the Railyard, and the streets are quiet before midnight. It suits a slow evening, while Huntington Beach suits a weekend night out.

Santa Fe has the bigger landscapes. Trails leave from the edge of town into piñon foothills, and the ski road climbs to aspen forest and the Pecos Wilderness. Desert mesas, Valles Caldera and the Rio Grande Gorge are all within a drive.

In Huntington Beach the outdoors means the ocean: surfing, paddling in the harbour channels and cycling the beach path, with fine birding at Bolsa Chica. Beyond that the land is flat suburb, and for hills you drive south to Crystal Cove or Laguna.

With a car, both are good bases, but the trips go in different directions. From Huntington Beach they lead to big names along busy freeways: Los Angeles, Laguna Beach, San Diego, and Catalina Island by ferry.

Santa Fe's trips are packed with history and landscape. There is the High Road through Chimayo to Taos Pueblo, the cliff dwellings at Bandelier, Pecos, and O'Keeffe country around Abiquiu. It has the edge for travellers who want each outing to show them something they cannot see anywhere else.

Huntington Beach is far easier with children. Disneyland and Knott's Berry Farm are under half an hour away, and the wide sand, the pelicans at Bolsa Chica and the lakes of Central Park fill the days. The surf is better for boogie boarding than for toddlers, though.

Santa Fe is safe and calm but made for adults. The main things for children are a children's museum, the ladders at Bandelier and ski lessons in winter. The altitude can tire small children at first, so it works better with older ones who like hiking and history.

Huntington Beach is walkable only along a short strip of pier, Main Street and the blocks of downtown. A rented bike on the flat beach path stretches that along the shore, but almost every reason to stay in the area, from Disneyland to Little Saigon, lies down a freeway.

Santa Fe's historic core is also small, but it holds most of what a visitor comes for, so a full day of churches, museums and galleries needs no car at all. The thin air at 2,100m slows you down on the slopes. Beyond that core both places are car country. Museum Hill, the trailheads, the pueblos and Taos are easiest reached by hire car, and the train to Albuquerque is the one useful exception.

Huntington Beach shops for the surf: board makers, surf brands and swimwear along Main Street and by the pier, and a surfboard is the most characteristic thing to take home. For fashion, South Coast Plaza in Costa Mesa is about twenty minutes away and has the major luxury houses, which Santa Fe has little of.

For anything with real character, though, Santa Fe is far richer. Native American artists sell silver, turquoise and pottery directly under the portal of the Palace of the Governors, and Canyon Road and the Railyard are packed with galleries. In summer the Indian, Spanish and International Folk Art markets draw collectors from far away.

Neither is cheap, and the costs come from the same places: hotels charging resort prices, restaurants aimed at well-off visitors and a hire car you can hardly do without.

Where you save differs. In Huntington Beach the beach is free, and the Vietnamese and Mexican cooking of the surrounding county is good value. In Santa Fe cheaper rooms are out along Cerrillos Road and hiking and gallery browsing cost nothing, though hotel rates climb during the summer markets and the opera season.

Huntington Beach relies on its neighbour. In town there is little beyond bar bands and summer concerts in the park, so anyone wanting a proper evening at the theatre drives to Costa Mesa. There, the Segerstrom Center and South Coast Repertory keep symphony, ballet, touring musicals and drama going through the year, which makes them a dependable choice in any season.

Overall, Santa Fe offers more memorable evenings, though most of them fall in summer. Its opera, staged on a hillside outside town as the desert light fades, is known for rarely heard works as well as the favourites, and chamber music and flamenco fill the same months. Out of season it becomes a small-town programme at the Lensic and in the churches, so plan for midsummer if music is the reason for going.

Santa Fe is the better choice for a trip planned around rest. It has outdoor soaking tubs among the pines on the road to the ski area and the mineral springs of Ojo Caliente an hour north. It also has an unusual number of spas and yoga studios for its size.

Huntington Beach has resort spas and day spas but no bathing tradition. Rest there is simpler: yoga on the sand, sunset on the pier and an evening around a beach fire.