Nuevo Vallarta or Puebla?

There is no contest here. Nuevo Vallarta is a beach town first and last. It has kilometres of soft golden sand on Banderas Bay and warm water that shelves gently, with the coves of Punta Mita and the surf at Sayulita within an hour.

Puebla sits on a plateau more than 2,000m up and several hours from the Gulf coast. Swimming there means a hotel pool or a spring-fed balneario on the edge of the city.

Puebla is a city you go to for the food. Mole poblano was born in its convent kitchens. Cemitas, chalupas, tacos árabes and the sweets of the Calle de los Dulces make every meal part of the visit, and the market halls and fondas keep it cheap.

Nuevo Vallarta has a fine coastal cooking of its own, from wood-grilled pescado zarandeado to aguachile and raicilla, but you mostly find it by leaving the resorts for Bucerias or Puerto Vallarta. Seafood lovers will eat well if they plan those evenings out. Everyone else tends to stay with the hotel food.

Puebla wins this by a long way. Its centre is a UNESCO-listed grid of brick and tiled house fronts and churches. The gilded Capilla del Rosario, the Biblioteca Palafoxiana and the Museo Amparo are all within walking distance of the cathedral.

Nuevo Vallarta is a planned enclave of hotels, golf courses and a marina, with no historic core or museums at all. The nearest old streets are Puerto Vallarta's cobbled lanes, and getting there is an outing in itself.

Nuevo Vallarta's evenings are quiet. You get a lobby bar, a poolside show or a drink at the marina, and the strip is asleep by midnight. A late night needs a taxi to Puerto Vallarta's malecon or the Zona Romantica.

Neither is a party city, but Puebla gives you more to do after dark without leaving town. There are mezcal bars, cantinas and terraces with cathedral views around the Callejón de los Sapos. Cholula has a student bar strip that fills from Thursday to Saturday.

Nuevo Vallarta's outdoors is mostly on the water. Humpback whales calve in the bay from December to March, and you can snorkel at the Marietas Islands. Turtles nest on the beaches, there is surf at Punta Mita and the Ameca mangroves hold herons and crocodiles, with jungle foothills rising behind.

Puebla's landscape is high and volcanic. Popocatépetl and Iztaccíhuatl fill the skyline on clear winter mornings, and La Malinche is a hard day's climb through pine forest. Almost every outing needs a car or a tour, though, and the city's own parks are modest.

Puebla has the richer surroundings. Cholula's Great Pyramid with its church on top, the decorated village churches of Tonantzintla and Acatepec, and the convent at Huejotzingo are all close. Tlaxcala with the Cacaxtla murals is about an hour away, and even Mexico City can be done in a long day.

From Nuevo Vallarta the trips run along the coast: Puerto Vallarta's old town, the galleries of Bucerias, Sayulita and San Pancho, and boat-only Yelapa. Inland there is the old mining village of San Sebastian del Oeste. These make pleasant days out, but none has the archaeology or colonial history found around Puebla.

Nuevo Vallarta is the easier choice with children. The resorts have shallow pools, slides and kids' clubs, and the beach shelves gently. The outings children remember are whale watching, turtle releases at dusk and the boat trip to the Marietas, though the summer heat keeps them indoors at midday.

Puebla works for a few days, with Africam Safari's drive-through park, the tunnels inside Cholula's pyramid and the observation wheel at Angelópolis. Beyond those, most sights are churches and museums aimed at adults, and the narrow pavements and altitude tire small children.

Puebla is far easier on foot, at least in the centre. It is a flat, regular grid where nearly every sight is within twenty minutes' walk of the zócalo. Beyond it there is no metro, so taxis and ride-hailing apps take over.

Nuevo Vallarta stretches along a resort boulevard where little is within walking distance apart from the beach. Taxis, shuttles and tours do most of the work, and a hire car helps on the northern coast. Its one advantage is the airport, only about twenty minutes away.

Puebla makes the craft it sells. You can buy Talavera from workshops where you watch it being painted, and onyx and textiles at El Parián. There are antiques stalls on the Callejón de los Sapos at weekends, and the Angelópolis malls have the international brands.

Nuevo Vallarta itself offers little more than resort boutiques and a modest mall. The Huichol beadwork and yarn paintings worth taking home are found in Bucerias and at Puerto Vallarta's river market.

Puebla is much the cheaper trip. Street food, market lunches, taxis and museum entry all cost little, and a room in a restored colonial house near the zócalo costs far less than its equivalent in the capital.

Nuevo Vallarta is built for North American resort budgets, and everything inside the enclave is priced to match. All-inclusive packages at least make costs predictable. The local buses and the taco stands of Bucerias make it cheaper for anyone willing to go out.

Neither city is worth choosing for its performances, but Puebla has real stages. The Teatro Principal is one of the oldest theatres in the Americas, and the university's cultural complex puts on dance and orchestral evenings.

Nuevo Vallarta's shows are resort entertainment, mariachi dinners and folkloric dance, plus one permanent acrobatic dinner theatre. For anything more, the cabaret and drag stages of Puerto Vallarta are the only option.

Nuevo Vallarta is the clear choice for a vacation spent unwinding. The whole enclave is built for doing very little: long pool days, yoga on the sand, massages under palapas, and resort spas with hydrotherapy circuits and guided temazcal ceremonies. The catch is that all of it sits inside the hotels, so pick where you stay with the spa in mind.

Puebla has much less, and you have to go looking for it. Apart from hotel spas there are temazcal sessions at small spas around Cholula and the sulphurous pools of the Agua Azul balneario, but there is no bathing culture to plan a trip around. Its calm is the kind a city gives you, a quiet plaza early in the morning or a long lunch in a courtyard, set between days of sightseeing rather than replacing them.