Laguna Beach or San Jose?

Laguna Beach is built around its shoreline. Main Beach, Crescent Bay, Shaw's Cove, Thousand Steps and the broad sand at Aliso are all within the town, and the reefs offshore make the water clear enough for snorkelling. The limits are steep stairways down to many coves, rip currents that change from cove to cove, and crowds on summer weekends.

San Jose has no beach of its own. Santa Cruz and Capitola are pleasant and sunny, but they are about 45 minutes away over the mountains, and the water is too cold for most people to do more than paddle or surf in a wetsuit.

San Jose is the stronger place to eat. It has one of the largest Vietnamese communities in the country, with pho and banh mi in the east-side plazas, and serious taquerias, Indian and Korean restaurants along the corridors towards Santa Clara. You have to drive to find them, because the best cooking is spread through suburban strip malls.

Laguna Beach offers fish tacos, poke, surfers' breakfast cafés and a few seafood kitchens with California wine, and the sunset view does much of the work. The range is narrow and prices follow the view. Visitors who want variety drive inland to Orange County for the same kind of Vietnamese and Mexican food that San Jose has in its own neighbourhoods.

Neither is a culture destination, but San Jose gives you more to see. The Winchester Mystery House, the Rosicrucian Egyptian Museum and Mission Santa Clara are real curiosities, and the Computer History Museum in Mountain View tells the Silicon Valley story. That fills a couple of days.

Laguna's heritage is its past as a plein air art colony. You see it in the Laguna Art Museum and in the galleries along Coast Highway and Forest Avenue, and a single morning covers both. Its nearest major historic sight, the mission at San Juan Capistrano, is outside town.

San Jose has a modest scene but a real one. San Pedro Square fills with pubs and beer halls around arena events, and South First Street in SoFA adds cocktail bars, late dive bars and a few dance clubs that are busy at weekends. On other nights it is quiet, and anyone wanting a big night takes the train to San Francisco.

In Laguna Beach a night out means a drink after dinner in a beach bar, a wine bar or a hotel terrace. There are no clubs, and the village is asleep well before midnight.

Both are strong outdoor bases, but the outdoors is different in each. Laguna's coast is a marine protected area, so tide pooling, snorkelling over kelp, kayaking and paddleboarding start at the bottom of the street. Laguna Coast Wilderness Park and Aliso and Wood Canyons add chaparral ridges for hiking and mountain biking.

San Jose's strengths are forest and hills. There are old-growth redwoods at Big Basin and Henry Cowell, ridge trails at Castle Rock and the road up Mount Hamilton. The Monterey Bay, with its sea otters and the headlands of Point Lobos, is around an hour and a half away. Almost all of it needs a car.

San Jose has the richer choice of outings, and some of them need no car. Caltrain reaches San Francisco in about an hour, Stanford is close, and Santa Cruz, Monterey and Carmel make easy days by road. Napa and Sonoma are within range when traffic allows.

Laguna Beach also has plenty within a drive. Mission San Juan Capistrano is twenty minutes away, the ferry to Catalina leaves from Dana Point, and San Diego is about an hour and a half south. Los Angeles is a similar distance north, but the freeways can make that day much longer.

With children, Laguna Beach means beach days and San Jose means theme parks and museums. In Laguna the shore does the work: tide pools full of crabs and anemones, lifeguarded sand, the Main Beach playground and the free trolley between coves, with Disneyland about forty minutes away. The steep stairways down to many beaches and the cost of family-sized rooms are the drawbacks.

San Jose has Great America in neighbouring Santa Clara, the small Happy Hollow zoo, and a children's discovery museum and a technology museum with an IMAX dome downtown. Suburban hotels with pools and parking keep things simple. The Monterey Bay Aquarium and the Santa Cruz Boardwalk make good days out, though both mean time in the car.

In both places you will want a car, and the difference is in the details. Laguna's village is walkable and a free trolley runs along Coast Highway, but there is no rail and parking is scarce in summer.

San Jose has a compact, flat downtown, light rail and Caltrain to San Francisco. Everything else is spread across a valley of freeways, and rush hour has to be planned around.

Laguna Beach is a place to buy art, and San Jose is a place to buy brands. Galleries along Coast Highway and the North Laguna gallery row sell plein air landscapes, ocean painting and glass. The summer festivals sell crafts straight from the makers, and Forest Avenue has beachwear and jewellery. For luxury labels you drive half an hour to Newport Beach or Costa Mesa.

San Jose puts the international and luxury names together in its large west-side mall and the open-air boutique street beside it, with easy parking. Independent shopping is thinner. It comes down to Japantown, the main streets of Los Gatos and Willow Glen, and browsing the Asian supermarkets.

Both are expensive, and San Jose is slightly less so. Its hotels are priced for business travellers, so weekends can be noticeably cheaper, and the Vietnamese and Mexican plaza eateries are still fair value. The cost of car hire is the catch.

Laguna works the opposite way. Summer weekends are the dearest time, and even simple motels charge high rates. Free beaches, trails and the trolley help, but many budget travellers sleep inland and come to Laguna for the day.

Laguna Beach's best evening is a summer one, while San Jose spreads its programme across the year. The Pageant of the Masters, a tradition since the 1930s, has live performers recreating famous paintings as tableaux in a canyon amphitheatre, with an orchestra and narration. Outside the festival season, the Laguna Playhouse carries on with plays and musicals.

San Jose has Opera San José in the restored California Theatre, a symphony and touring Broadway shows at the Center for the Performing Arts, big concerts at the arena and a summer jazz festival in the downtown streets. On an ordinary weeknight the choice is still limited.

Laguna Beach is much better for unwinding. The pace of the town is slow, there are clifftop resorts with ocean-view spas and yoga studios in the village, and sunset over the water is part of every day. Most of the spa offer sits in expensive resorts.

San Jose is built around the working week. Its Korean-style bathhouses with saunas and soaking pools are something Laguna lacks, and Hakone and the Japanese Friendship Garden are calm places for an hour.