Mexico City or Panama City?

You can't swim off either city's own shoreline, but from Panama City the sea is at least close. Taboga's small, calm beach is a short ferry ride out, the Pacific sand at Coronado is about an hour or more by road, and the clearer Caribbean water near Portobelo is under two hours away. The water is warm all year.

Mexico City sits high on its plateau with Acapulco several hours away by road, so a beach means a separate leg of the journey. In town, swimming means a hotel pool.

The gap here is wide. Mexico City is one of the world's great places to eat. Its range runs from al pastor at late-night taco stands and blue-corn quesadillas at Medellín or La Merced markets up to the tasting menus of Roma, Condesa and Polanco, with mezcal bars and old pulquerías alongside.

Panama City's cooking is narrower and centred on the sea: cups of ceviche at the Mercado de Mariscos, whole fried fish with patacones, sancocho in neighbourhood fondas and chef-led cooking in Casco Viejo. Its strongest card is coffee, above all the highland Geisha.

Mexico City has layers that take a week to get through. There is the Zócalo with the cathedral and Rivera's murals in the National Palace, the Aztec Templo Mayor beside them, the Anthropology Museum with the Sun Stone, and Frida Kahlo's house in Coyoacán.

Panama City's history is compact. It has the balconied colonial streets of Casco Viejo and the ruins of Panamá Viejo, both UNESCO-listed, plus the Biomuseo, and two or three days covers it. What Mexico City has no answer to is the Canal at Miraflores, a working piece of engineering that you watch rather than visit as a monument.

Both cities stay out late, but Mexico City has more nightlife and more kinds of it. In Roma and Condesa you walk between mezcalerías, cocktail bars and small dance floors, the Centro's cantinas keep an older tradition going, and salsa halls and the Zona Rosa's large LGBTQ scene add more.

Panama City's evenings start on Casco Viejo's rooftops, looking across the bay at the lit-up towers, then move on to reggaeton and salsa clubs around Calle Uruguay. The crowd is dressier, a mix of locals, expats and business visitors, and you get between places by taxi rather than on foot.

Here Panama City pulls well ahead. The rainforest begins inside the city at Parque Natural Metropolitano, Soberanía and the Pipeline Road draw birdwatchers about forty minutes out, and boats from Gamboa pass monkeys on Gatún Lake beside the Canal shipping.

In Mexico City, the outdoors means parks and high ground: Chapultepec, Xochimilco's canals, the pine forest of Desierto de los Leones, and the volcanoes and Nevado de Toluca about two hours away. Traffic on the way out and the dry-season air take some of the pleasure away.

Mexico City has more first-rate outings within a day's reach. Teotihuacan's pyramids are about an hour away, and further out are tiled Puebla with the great pyramid at Cholula, Taxco's silver-town hillsides and the slower pace of Tepoztlán and Cuernavaca.

From Panama City, the best day out is to the Caribbean forts at Portobelo and San Lorenzo. A partial Canal transit, the Taboga ferry or a dugout trip to an Emberá village are the other options. Its most rewarding trips, to the San Blas and Pearl Islands, really need a night away.

Chapultepec could fill several days with children on its own, with the zoo, the boating lakes and the hands-on science of the Papalote museum all in one park. Add a trajinera on Xochimilco with mariachis drifting past and a loud night of lucha libre, and Mexico City gives families plenty to choose from. The catch is its size and altitude, so plan each day around one neighbourhood.

Panama City has fewer big attractions for children, but several stick in the memory: ships squeezing through the locks at Miraflores, the Biomuseo's hands-on displays, quadricycles on the Amador Causeway and boat trips past monkeys. The heat, humidity and wet-season downpours tire young ones faster than Mexico City's mild highland days, and in a city built for cars you will take taxis most of the time.

Mexico City is the easier of the two to get around without a car, though neither is effortless. The Centro, Roma and Condesa, Polanco and Coyoacán each make a good day on foot, and the metro, with its colour-coded lines and a picture symbol for every station, ties them together for very little money, helped by the Metrobús lanes and shared bikes. The drawbacks are the city's sheer size, crowded rush-hour carriages where you need to watch for pickpockets, and slow roads, so ride-hailing cars fill the gaps, especially after dark.

In Panama City you rely on taxis far more. You can walk all of Casco Viejo in a morning, and the Cinta Costera path takes walkers and cyclists on to the banking towers. Beyond that, the city is a strip of highways where the heat and broken pavements soon wear you out. Its tidy metro follows the city's spine and passes by most of what visitors come to see, so cheap taxis and ride-hailing do most of the work. For Gamboa or the coast, a hired car or driver saves a lot of trouble, while in Mexico City a car is more of a burden than a help.

Mexico City is far better for browsing. La Ciudadela gathers crafts from across the country, the Lagunilla flea market and San Ángel's Saturday bazaar make a long morning, and Masaryk and the Roma designers cover fashion.

In Panama City, shopping mostly means vast air-conditioned malls full of international brands and electronics. The real find is the mola, the layered textile sewn by Guna women, sold alongside Emberá baskets and highland coffee by vendors in Casco Viejo.

Your money goes further in Mexico City. Market lunches, street tacos, metro rides and museum entry all cost little, and only Roma, Condesa and Polanco charge European-style prices.

Panama City is cheap at the fondas, at the fish market and in taxis, but rooms in Casco Viejo and the banking district, imported drinks and guided trips to the rainforest or islands raise the cost of a stay faster.

Mexico City has a full programme all year. Bellas Artes stages opera, the symphony and the Ballet Folklórico, the university orchestra plays at Sala Nezahualcóyotl, mariachis play every night in Plaza Garibaldi and lucha libre fills Arena México.

Panama City's Teatro Nacional is a lovely small theatre, but its season is short. The January jazz festival is the event to plan a trip around. The rest of the year, live music means salsa and típico in bars, which you are more likely to find by chance than book ahead.

The temazcal, a steam bath ritual with pre-Hispanic roots, gives Mexico City a wellness tradition of its own, and some spas offer it alongside the good hotel and day spas of Polanco, Roma and Condesa. The city is noisy, but Coyoacán's shaded plazas give you quieter hours, and Cuernavaca and Tepoztlán are close enough to the south for a proper retreat.

Panama City has no bathing tradition to match, so relaxing means a hotel pool deck in Punta Pacífica or an early walk through Casco Viejo before the heat builds. To really slow down, visitors leave for the cooler highland valleys or a lodge on the islands.