Ocho Rios or Trinidad, Cuba?

Ocho Rios is built around the shore. The reef keeps the water calm enough to snorkel straight off Turtle Beach or Mahogany Beach, and your resort's own strip is usually a few steps from your room. The catch is that the beaches are small, much of the best sand belongs to hotels, and some public ones charge for entry.

Trinidad's Playa Ancon is the longer, paler strand, with good reef snorkelling too, but it sits on a peninsula a taxi or bike ride from town. Most visitors go for an afternoon between days in the old town. For a vacation spent in the sea, Ocho Rios fits better.

Neither town is a reason to travel for food, but Ocho Rios has more to seek out. Jerk smoked over pimento wood at the roadside centres, patties, fried fish with festival, and ackee and saltfish for breakfast make a real street-food culture worth leaving the resort for.

Trinidad has no street food. Its best meals are home-cooked dinners of pork, rice and beans or lobster at a casa particular or in a paladar on a rooftop, and supply shortages mean menus repeat from place to place. Have a canchanchara in a clay cup there. In Jamaica, drink rum and Blue Mountain coffee.

Here the two are far apart. Trinidad is a sugar-era town preserved almost whole, with pastel houses, wooden window grilles and church towers around the Plaza Mayor. You can climb the Palacio Cantero tower for a view over the rooftops or tour the planters' furniture in the Museo Romantico. Two or three days of wandering is the main event.

Ocho Rios grew up as a resort and cruise port and has almost no historic fabric. Seville Heritage Park, on the site of Jamaica's first Spanish settlement, and a few hillside plantation houses are about all there is nearby.

Trinidad gives you a night out on foot. After dinner, people gather on the stone steps beside the Plaza Mayor to drink rum and dance salsa, courtyard bars fill up nearby, and the late finish is a club inside a cave on the hill. It's small and much the same each night, but locals and visitors really do mix.

In Ocho Rios, evenings mostly happen inside the resort, with hotel bars and theme nights. The weekend street dances with big sound systems are the most local thing on offer, but they depend on the night, and getting back means a taxi.

Both towns have plenty of green outdoors, but of different kinds. Around Ocho Rios it is about water and organised adventure: climbing Dunn's River Falls with a guide, swimming in the Blue Hole pools, tubing the White River, driving through Fern Gully's tree ferns and riding a zipline through the canopy. The walks are short.

Trinidad has real mountain hiking. In the Escambray, steep, humid forest trails at Topes de Collantes lead to Salto del Caburni and on to the cascades of El Nicho. Closer to town, horse rides cross the Valle de los Ingenios. Both have reef snorkelling just offshore.

Trinidad has richer outings, and the best starts at the edge of town. The Valle de los Ingenios, with its ruined sugar mills and the Manaca Iznaga tower, shares the UNESCO listing. Neoclassical Cienfuegos, old Sancti Spiritus and Santa Clara's Che Guevara memorial are all within about two hours.

From Ocho Rios, the trips are more about people and music than whole towns. Choose from Noël Coward's Firefly, Bob Marley's birthplace at Nine Mile, or Kingston over the mountains for Devon House and the Marley museum. Both places need a driver or a tour for most of these.

Ocho Rios is the much easier choice with children, provided you base yourselves at a resort. Kids' clubs, shallow pools and family rooms cover the younger ones. Older children get the falls climb, dolphin encounters, the rainforest bobsled and river tubing.

Trinidad welcomes children warmly but offers them little beyond a day in Ancon's shallow water and a horse ride. Big uneven cobbles rule out pushchairs, and the heat, power cuts and gaps in familiar food and medicine make it hard going with small children.

Inside town, Trinidad is far easier. The old centre is a short walk end to end, and many lanes are closed to cars, so the only real hazards are the rough cobbles and slopes. Beyond that, you rely on taxis, bikes, the beach shuttle and slow long-distance coaches.

Ocho Rios has a compact centre that is still tiring to walk, with heavy traffic, missing pavements and constant offers from drivers. Resorts are spread along the coast, so most visitors use hotel transfers and licensed taxis. Route taxis are cheap but confusing for a first-time visitor.

Neither is a shopping destination, and the difference is in what you bring home. Ocho Rios shopping follows the cruise ships: duty-free jewellery, watches and liquor by the pier, plus a craft market where sellers push hard and bargaining is expected. Rum, coffee and hot sauce make the best souvenirs.

Trinidad sells things with a local tradition behind them. Look for hand embroidery and crochet hung along the market lanes, pots from family workshops and paintings in small galleries. Buy cigars and rum from the state shops rather than from street sellers.

Trinidad stretches a budget much further. A room in a casa particular costs little and usually includes breakfast, the music in the squares is free or close to it, and the old town is all on foot. The costs that add up are paladar meals, taxis to the beach and mountains, and tours, and you need to carry cash.

Ocho Rios is a mid-range trip at best. All-inclusive resorts dominate, and tours and imported goods are priced for visitors. Eating at jerk stands and staying in a hillside guesthouse cut the bill, but they don't make it a budget destination.

Live music is the heart of Trinidad and a sideshow in Ocho Rios. In Trinidad, son, salsa and bolero play every night at the Casa de la Musica and the Casa de la Trova, and the Palenque de los Congos Reales stages Afro-Cuban drumming and rumba. There is no theatre or classical stage, but the standard is high.

In Ocho Rios, live music mostly means resort reggae bands and folk shows put on for guests, plus the odd weekend dancehall stage show. Jamaica's big concerts happen elsewhere on the island.

Ocho Rios is the place to unwind. Resort spas, some in open-air pavilions on cliffs above the sea, plus hammocks and early nights behind the hotel gates make rest easy, as long as you stay away from the town centre on cruise days.

Trinidad has no spa culture, only massages in a few Ancon hotels. Its shaded courtyards and rocking chairs on doorsteps look restful, but roosters at dawn, horse carts on the cobbles, music until late and power cuts that stop the fans make real rest harder to find.