La Paz or San Pedro de Atacama?

Neither place belongs on a beach trip. La Paz sits in a canyon in a landlocked country, and San Pedro is a desert oasis a long drive from the Pacific. In La Paz the only swimming is in a heated hotel pool, because Lake Titicaca is too cold to swim in.

San Pedro de Atacama at least has something unusual: you can float without effort in the dense salt water of Laguna Cejar or the Baltinache pools. It lasts about an hour, in cool water under a hard sun with no shade, and it is not an afternoon on the sand.

La Paz is much the better place to eat, because food there is part of daily street life rather than something laid on for visitors. Purple-corn api at dawn, salteñas at mid-morning and anticucho grills on street corners after dark give the day its rhythm. Mercado Rodríguez and Mercado Lanza sell more than a hundred kinds of potato and serve soups at long shared tables, and a few ambitious kitchens in Sopocachi cook with llama and Amazonian fish. Everyday cooking is often heavy and fried, and the altitude can take away your appetite for the first day or two, but there is still far more to explore than in San Pedro.

San Pedro de Atacama has no markets or street food, so every meal is eaten in the visitor restaurants along Caracoles. The better ones use Andean ingredients such as chañar, goat cheese and rica-rica, and a lunch menu of soup and a main course is the simple, honest choice. The village is small, so there is little choice, and after a few nights most people are eating to refuel between excursions rather than for the pleasure of it.

La Paz is a capital with plenty to explore. There is the carved stone front of San Francisco, Plaza Murillo, the small museums on Calle Jaén and a strong ethnography collection. The living culture is just as rewarding: the Witches' Market, cholitas in bowler hats and the brightly decorated cholet mansions of El Alto.

San Pedro de Atacama's heritage is quieter and fits into half a day by bike. It takes in the cactus-wood ceiling of the adobe church, the hillside Pukará de Quitor fortress and the round adobe houses of Tulor, more than two thousand years old. They add a human side to the desert, but they are not a reason to go.

Neither is a party destination, but in La Paz you can have a night out. There are small bars and cocktail places in Sopocachi, traveller bars around Sagárnaga and clubs in the southern zone at weekends. Even so, the cold and the altitude send most visitors to bed early.

In San Pedro de Atacama, an evening out means a pisco sour by a fire pit on Caracoles, and the village is quiet before midnight. The most memorable night there is an astronomy tour under the desert sky.

Both are superb bases for high-altitude landscapes, and each happens to have its own Valle de la Luna. San Pedro de Atacama comes out ahead because so much variety is so close. There are the dunes of the Valle de la Muerte, flamingos on the Salar de Atacama, the El Tatio geysers at sunrise and the Miscanti and Miñiques lagoons below snow-streaked volcanoes, with sun almost every day.

La Paz offers glaciers and real mountaineering, with Huayna Potosí the obvious goal, as well as the Death Road ride from the snowline down into cloud forest. It suits climbers and riders, but its skies are only reliably clear in the dry season.

La Paz has the better destination for a single day. Tiwanaku, a major pre-Inca site with the Gateway of the Sun, is about an hour and a half across the Altiplano, and El Alto's huge market is right above the city. Copacabana, Isla del Sol and Coroico are better with a night away.

From San Pedro de Atacama, almost every outing goes into the landscape rather than to another place worth visiting. The white-stone village of Toconao and the old church at Chiu Chiu are pleasant, and the Chuquicamata copper mine is an unusual extra, but none of them compares with Tiwanaku.

Altitude makes both of them hard with young children, but San Pedro de Atacama is the gentler of the two. Its village is small, calm and lower down, and older children can go sandboarding, float in a salt lagoon and look through telescopes. Families usually stick to the shorter outings and stay at a lodge with a pool.

In La Paz you land in El Alto at about 4,000m and then face steep streets, narrow pavements and fierce traffic. The cable cars and the Mallasa zoo are the main treats. Teenagers can cope, but with small children it is better to choose a lower base.

La Paz has a proper transport network. The Mi Teleférico cable cars link the centre, the southern suburbs and El Alto, and cheap taxis fill the gaps. The minibuses are hard for visitors to use, though, and the steep streets leave you breathless at this altitude.

You can walk across San Pedro de Atacama in ten minutes, but beyond the village there is no public transport. You rely on minibus tours, a hired high-clearance car or a bike for the nearby valleys. Getting there means a ride of about an hour and a half from Calama airport.

Both sell alpaca knitwear and Andean textiles, but La Paz has far more. The lanes around Sagárnaga and Linares also sell silver and musical instruments, the Mercado Negro is a maze of everyday trade, and El Alto's 16 de Julio fair spreads over dozens of streets.

San Pedro de Atacama has a craft market near the plaza and shops on Caracoles. Lapis lazuli jewellery and volcanic-stone carvings stand out among much the same stock you find across the region. A warm wool layer for the freezing dawn starts is the one thing really worth buying.

Cost is where the two differ most. La Paz is very cheap: market lunches, taxis and cable cars cost little, and comfortable hotels in Sopocachi or the centre are a bargain. The main costs are guided climbs and the Death Road ride.

San Pedro de Atacama is expensive even by Chilean standards, because everything comes across the desert by truck and the village lives off visitors. Rooms, restaurant dinners, tours and park fees all add up. Set lunches, self-catering and a rented bike are the ways to save.

La Paz has a real folk music scene. In the peñas, musicians play charangos, panpipes and drums while dancers perform the morenada and the diablada. The Teatro Municipal has a modest programme, and every year the Gran Poder festival fills the streets with tens of thousands of dancers.

San Pedro de Atacama has little beyond Andean musicians in restaurants on busy evenings. The exceptions are the feast of San Pedro and San Pablo and Carnival, when costumed troupes dance through the village.

San Pedro de Atacama is the better place to unwind. The Termas de Puritama step down a reed-filled canyon at around 30°C, lodges have spas and pools looking towards the volcanoes, and the village slows down for a siesta in the heat of the day. Pre-dawn tours undo some of that calm, so leave a few days empty.

La Paz offers little rest. The centre is noisy and full of exhaust fumes, sleep at altitude is poor for the first nights, and there are only a few hotel spas. The nearest thermal pools, at Urmiri, are two hours away, so coca tea and an early night are what most visitors fall back on.