Key West or West Palm Beach?

Key West's sea is lovely, but its beaches are small. Smathers Beach is a strip of imported sand, the shore at Fort Zachary Taylor is coral rubble, and seagrass flats make long swims awkward. For a proper beach day you drive about an hour to Bahia Honda.

West Palm Beach has the better beaches, and it isn't close. Midtown Beach and Phipps Ocean Park on Palm Beach have soft sand and clear Atlantic water, Singer Island and Juno are wider and quieter, and Peanut Island has sheltered swimming. Seaweed washes in on some late-summer days in both places.

Key West eats like a Cuban fishing town. The day starts with café con leche from a takeaway window, and then come conch fritters, dockside fish shacks and arguments over Key lime pie. It is good for a few days, but the range is narrow and Duval Street is mostly bar food.

West Palm Beach gives you a little more choice. There are waterfront terraces on Clematis Street, formal dining rooms on Palm Beach, Haitian and Caribbean bakeries away from the centre, and a winter green market. Both places do stone crab and grilled grouper well.

Neither town needs more than two or three days of sightseeing, and they offer different things. In Key West the streets are the attraction: Old Town's wooden cottages and verandas, with small house museums such as Hemingway's home and Truman's Little White House.

West Palm Beach has the stronger collections. The Norton Museum of Art and Flagler's marble Whitehall would be worth a stop in a much bigger city. Its townscape lies across the lagoon in the Mediterranean Revival villas of Palm Beach, because the downtown is largely modern.

Key West is the place for a long night out. Evenings start at sunset on Mallory Square and carry on along Duval Street, drink in hand, from one open-sided bar to the next until the small hours. A long-established gay scene runs at the upper end of the street.

West Palm Beach is tamer and dressier. There are cocktail bars, rooftop terraces and a couple of dance spots around Clematis Street and Rosemary Square, busy on Friday and Saturday but quiet on weeknights, and Palm Beach goes to bed early.

Both are flat, watery places where the outdoors means the sea, and the difference is in how you get to it. From Key West you go by boat: to the Florida Reef, to the mangrove flats for tarpon and bonefish, or out to the remote Dry Tortugas.

West Palm Beach offers more from the shore and on land. You can snorkel straight off the beach under the Blue Heron Bridge, walk the boardwalks at Grassy Waters and Loxahatchee for alligators and wading birds, and see sea turtles nest around Juno.

Key West sits at the end of the road. The Dry Tortugas ferry to Fort Jefferson is a fine day out, and the drive over the Seven Mile Bridge to Marathon is worth doing, but Miami is too far.

West Palm Beach has far more within reach. The fast train puts South Beach, Little Havana and Wynwood about an hour away, and Fort Lauderdale, the Morikami gardens at Delray Beach and Boca Raton's pink Mizner buildings are closer still.

Children enjoy Key West on the water, with glass-bottom boats, the calm shallows at Fort Zachary Taylor and the Hemingway cats. On land, though, there is only a small aquarium and a butterfly conservatory, and the drinking on Duval Street is hard to avoid.

West Palm Beach is set up for families. Lion Country Safari, the zoo, the science centre and aquarium and the Manatee Lagoon centre fill the days between guarded beaches, and the main drawback is that you need a car for nearly all of it.

Key West is the easier place to stay without a car. Old Town is small and flat, bikes and electric carts are the local way to travel, and almost everything is close to Duval Street. You only need wheels to go further up the Keys.

West Palm Beach has a walkable downtown with a free trolley and good rail links south. Beyond that, the beaches, the safari park and the towns up and down the coast are spread along wide roads where the buses are slow, so most visitors hire a car.

Key West's shops are something to browse on an evening walk: T-shirts and Key lime soap on Duval Street, with more interest in the Old Town galleries, the cigar makers and the harbour's sponge and shell shops.

West Palm Beach is a real shopping destination because of Worth Avenue, with its luxury houses and tiled courtyards, the designer consignment shops nearby and the long Antique Row on South Dixie Highway.

Both are expensive, and Key West is the harder on the budget. Land on the island is scarce, rooms cost a lot even in old conch guesthouses, and boat trips, diving and the Tortugas ferry soon add up. What saves money is that you can walk or cycle everywhere.

West Palm Beach is costly too, especially on Palm Beach in winter, but rooms downtown and in the beach towns give you more choice. That keeps a stay a little cheaper even after paying for a hire car. In both places late summer is the cheapest time to go.

Key West's performance mostly happens outdoors: jugglers and the trained-cat acts at the Mallory Square sunset, drag cabaret, and singer-songwriters in the Duval Street bars. The Tennessee Williams Theatre and a winter symphony make up the formal side.

West Palm Beach offers more serious evenings. The Kravis Center hosts Broadway tours and the Palm Beach Opera, Palm Beach Dramaworks puts on serious plays, and a large amphitheatre brings big touring concerts. Both towns' programmes thin out in summer.

Neither has a bathing tradition, and both offer much the same calm in different ways. In Key West it comes from guesthouses built around small pools in quiet Old Town lanes and the daily pause for sunset, though the party is never far away.

West Palm Beach relaxes in a more polished way, with large oceanfront resort spas and the manicured hush of Palm Beach. An early walk along the Lake Trail beside the lagoon suits a slow day.