Marseille or Nantes?

In Marseille, the sea is part of daily life. People swim off the rocks at the Vallon des Auffes before work, families spread out on the lawns behind the Prado beaches, and on a free day there are the clear limestone inlets of the Calanques or the small coves on the Frioul islands. The mistral and occasional closures after storms are the only drawbacks.

In Nantes, a beach means a planned outing. The sandy bay at La Baule and the coves around Pornic are wide, clean and good for children, but they are about an hour away by train. The Atlantic water there stays cooler for a shorter season.

Marseille has more range and more character on the plate. You can sit down to a two-course bouillabaisse in a Corniche fishing harbour, buy fish straight off the boats on the Vieux-Port, and browse Comorian, Armenian and North African stalls in Noailles, with pastis and Cassis rosé to drink. The drawback is the tired set menus aimed at visitors around the old port.

Nantes is more regional and more consistent. Beurre blanc was born here and is served with pike-perch, alongside oysters from the nearby coast, galettes and a glass of Muscadet from the vineyards just outside town. Fairly priced bistros in Bouffay and Graslin make it easy to eat well, though the city doesn't have Marseille's mix of cultures.

The two are close in depth but very different in feel. In Marseille, 2,600 years of history are scattered through a working port city: the hilltop basilica of Notre-Dame de la Garde, the forts and the MuCEM at the harbour mouth, the Vieille Charité up in Le Panier, and Le Corbusier's Cité Radieuse further out. Seeing it all means crossing a lot of city.

Nantes keeps its heritage together. The moated Château des Ducs de Bretagne, the cathedral and the leaning merchant houses of the Ile Feydeau are all within a short walk. The history museum and the riverside memorial deal frankly with the city's part in the slave trade, and two or three days covers it all.

Marseille has the bigger and rougher night out. Graffiti-covered bars around Cours Julien and La Plaine spill onto the street until late, the Vieux-Port terraces fill at sunset, and in summer there are electronic nights in old warehouses and parties by the sea. Some central streets feel uneasy late at night, so a taxi home is sensible.

Nantes is friendlier and smaller in scale. Students fill the pubs and wine bars in the medieval lanes of Bouffay, then move to the clubs in the old banana warehouses on the Ile de Nantes. Midweek outside term it goes quiet.

This is one of the widest gaps between the two. Marseille has a national park inside the city limits, with white limestone ridges, pine gullies and the inlets of Sormiou, Sugiton and En-Vau. Climbers, sea kayakers and divers come for the cliffs and the Riou archipelago, and Montagne Sainte-Victoire is within an hour. In high summer, fire risk can close the massifs.

Nantes offers gentler, flatter country. You can follow the Erdre past manor houses by canoe or boat, cycle the Loire à Vélo route, or take a punt through the reed beds of the Brière marshes. The Côte Sauvage cliff paths are the most dramatic it gets.

Marseille gives you the big names of Provence on short train rides. The Roman arena at Arles, the Palais des Papes in Avignon and Cézanne's Aix are all close, and Cassis is closer still. With a car you can add the Luberon hilltop villages and Les Baux.

Nantes is a good base too, with a quieter list. It has the salt marshes and walls of Guérande, the Apocalypse Tapestry in Angers, Saumur and the Loire châteaux, and the half-timbered streets of Vannes. Most are about an hour away rather than half an hour.

Nantes is the easier city with children. The mechanical elephant and sea-creature carousel at the Machines de l'Ile were made for them, and trams make getting around with a buggy simple. Puy du Fou and the Port-Saint-Père safari park are good days out.

Marseille is harder work. The Prado beaches, Parc Borély's lake and a boat to the Château d'If all go down well. But the city has no zoo, aquarium or theme park, and its steep, narrow, traffic-heavy streets make a buggy hard going.

Nantes is the simpler city to move around. The centre is flat and compact, most sights are within half an hour's walk, the tram network is easy to pick up straight away, and cycling along the river is straightforward.

Marseille's core around the Vieux-Port and Le Panier is walkable but steep, and the two metro lines barely reach the coast. Getting to the beaches and the Calanques trailheads means buses stuck in traffic, though the summer ferries to Pointe Rouge and L'Estaque are a good way around the roads.

Neither city is a shopping destination, and both are better for local goods than for fashion. In Marseille that means green cubes of olive-oil soap, santon figures from the Le Panier workshops, and the fabrics and spices of Noailles. In Nantes it means browsing the three-level Passage Pommeraye and buying salted-butter biscuits, berlingots and Guérande salt to take home.

Both sit in the middle of the French price range, so the money differs in where it goes rather than how much. In Marseille, street food, the Calanques paths and cheap museums keep a day affordable, while rooms near the port and the beaches cost much more in July and August. In Nantes, hotels are easy to find, set lunches are good value, and the beach trips are where summer prices rise.

The two cities are evenly matched on stage, but their tastes differ. Marseille leans towards the popular and the Mediterranean: French hip-hop, the Fiesta des Suds world-music festival, serious drama at La Criée, and the mixed programme at the Friche la Belle de Mai.

Nantes is stronger on classical music. La Folle Journée fills a few winter days with short, cheap concerts, the regional opera performs at the Théâtre Graslin, and the city's tradition of giant street puppets brings spectacle into public squares.

Neither city is somewhere to come for spas, and each sends you out of town for real rest, though in different directions. Marseille is hard to unwind in: most central quarters are noisy and crowded, and its handful of hammams are neighbourhood places used mostly by locals. Its quiet lies beyond the city, along the coast towards Cassis or out in the Provençal countryside, so the restful way to do it is to stay outside and come in by day, saving the slow hours for a fish lunch in one of the little Corniche harbours.

Nantes is the gentler place to be day to day, with an unhurried centre where the banks of the Erdre and the Jardin des Plantes are easy places to do very little. For an actual treatment you go to the Atlantic, where La Baule and Pornic have a long tradition of thalassotherapy, the French seawater cure. In short, Marseille only gets quiet once you leave it, while Nantes is calm enough to live in and keeps its spa culture on the coast.