Orange Beach or Pensacola?

Both towns have the same fine white quartz sand and clear green Gulf water, so the difference is in how you reach it. In Orange Beach the beach is right outside the condo towers, and Alabama Point and the neighbouring state park give you extra room.

In Pensacola the beach is on Santa Rosa Island, about twenty minutes from downtown. In exchange you get long protected stretches of the Gulf Islands National Seashore and a calm, shallow sound side that suits toddlers.

Gulf seafood dominates in both, from royal red shrimp to chargrilled oysters, and neither has much depth beyond it. Orange Beach is a place for long dinners at fish houses on the back bays and the marina, with snapper and grouper from the charter boats and the local West Indies crab salad.

Pensacola adds a downtown dimension around Palafox Street: modern Southern kitchens, craft breweries, brunch spots and a Saturday market of local produce and baked goods. That gives you a little more variety over a week.

Here the two are far apart. Orange Beach has a small museum of Native American and fishing history, and that is about it.

Pensacola, the City of Five Flags, has the restored colonial and Victorian houses around Plaza Ferdinand and the Seville district, Fort Pickens on the tip of the island, and the vast National Naval Aviation Museum next to Fort Barrancas and the lighthouse. Bring ID for the air station. Visitors staying in Orange Beach usually end up driving to Pensacola to see these sights.

Pensacola has more going on after dark, mainly because its bars are close together. Downtown, Palafox Street and the old Seville Quarter offer pubs, cocktail bars, rooftop terraces and taprooms you can walk between, busy on weekends with locals and young Navy personnel.

Orange Beach is beach bars and marina decks, lively in spring break and summer and quiet otherwise, and it takes a car to get from one to the next. The Flora-Bama roadhouse on the state line sits closer to Orange Beach but is easy to reach from either town.

The scenery is the same flat country of dunes, salt marsh and maritime forest, but each town leads you to different parts of it. Orange Beach has a paved backcountry trail past alligator ponds into Gulf State Park, one of the Gulf's main charter fishing harbours, and birding at Bon Secour refuge.

Pensacola has the national seashore's boardwalks for herons and ospreys, a sunken aircraft carrier offshore that draws experienced divers, and, inland, canoeing and tubing on the clear, sand-bottomed Blackwater River.

Both towns share Mobile, Fairhope and Fort Morgan, and the difference is what lies beyond them. From Orange Beach, the best outing is Pensacola itself, about forty-five minutes away, for its forts and museums. The car ferry to Dauphin Island makes a pleasant extra.

From Pensacola, the coast to the east brings Destin's harbour and the planned resort towns of Seaside and Rosemary Beach. They are attractive, but they are mostly more beaches. Either way, every outing needs a car.

Orange Beach is the easier place with young children because a stay there takes so little planning. Many condos sit right on the sand with a pool and a kitchen, so naps, meals and early nights fit around the beach rather than around a drive, and the whole town keeps to that slow pace. The catch is that everything else is strung along one main road, so outings still mean the car, and rip currents mean keeping close watch in the water.

Pensacola suits families with slightly older children better. The National Naval Aviation Museum, home of the Blue Angels display team, can fill a whole day for anyone who loves planes, and the tunnels of Fort Pickens and the lighthouse climb appeal to the same age. With toddlers it is harder work: if you stay in town, the beach is a drive across the bridges every day, and there are no big attractions to fall back on when the children tire of the sand.

Both need a car, and neither has public transport worth planning around. Orange Beach is one long highway of condos and restaurants that jams in summer, and bikes are only useful on the paved trails.

Pensacola has a compact, walkable downtown and a free seasonal trolley along the beach strip. The beach, the air station and Perdido Key are all separate drives, though.

Neither is a shopping destination. Orange Beach sells beachwear, surf and fishing gear around the marina, and the large outlet mall in Foley, about twenty minutes inland, is where people go for brand names. Pensacola's Palafox Street has a few independent boutiques and antique shops, and its Saturday market has local crafts, which makes browsing a little more interesting.

Pensacola is the slightly cheaper of the two, mostly because you can stay in town or inland and drive to the beach, the aviation museum is free and the national seashore costs little.

Orange Beach is priced like a standard American beach resort. It works out best for groups sharing a big condo and cooking some meals. Both get much cheaper from late autumn to early spring, and both need a hire car in the budget.

The two towns offer about the same amount of live entertainment, but of different kinds. Orange Beach is about live music: touring country and rock acts at the marina amphitheatre, cover bands in the beach bars and the November songwriters' festival around the state line.

Pensacola's restored Saenger Theatre puts on the local symphony, opera, ballet and touring shows, which Orange Beach has no equivalent for.

Neither has a spa culture beyond hotel and day spas, so what you get is a slow pace out of season. In Orange Beach that means sunsets over the back bays and empty autumn and winter mornings. In Pensacola it means the island and the quiet stretches of Perdido Key once the summer peak has passed, though Perdido Key lies between the two towns and is easy to reach from either.