Salzburg or Wroclaw?

Neither city is on the sea, but Salzburg gives swimmers something real. Fuschlsee, Wolfgangsee and Mondsee are clear lakes within an hour, warm enough in high summer, and you get into the water from lawns and wooden jetties.

Wroclaw's sandy beaches along the Oder are for deckchairs and a drink, not for swimming. Getting in the water there means an outdoor pool or a reservoir out in the countryside.

Both cities serve filling Central European food, and neither is worth the journey for dinner alone. Salzburg's best moments are its coffee houses and cakes, the Salzburger Nockerl and the monastery beer garden in Mülln. Old-town menus there are expensive and much alike.

Wroclaw has pierogi, żurek served in a bread bowl and cheap milk-bar lunches, plus brewpubs in historic cellars and lighter Polish bistros just off the Market Square. Eating out is cheaper and a little more varied here, but nothing matches Salzburg's café afternoons.

Salzburg's old town is the more complete showpiece. The cathedral, the Residenz and the arcaded squares form one Baroque whole under the Hohensalzburg fortress. Mozart's two houses and the catacombs of St Peter are a few minutes' walk away, and two or three days covers it all.

Wroclaw's appeal is its story of rebuilding after 1945. You see it in the Market Square and its Gothic town hall, in the red-brick churches of Ostrów Tumski as the gas lamps are lit, and in the concrete Centennial Hall. The Racławice Panorama and the National Museum are well worth a visit, but the city is a set of parts rather than a single masterpiece.

For going out, Wroclaw is the obvious choice. Students fill the cellars around the Market Square and the bar-packed passage off Ruska Street, and at weekends people drift from door to door until well past 2am. In summer the drinking moves out to the riverbanks.

A Salzburg evening is a concert, a late dinner and a litre of beer at a long wooden table. A few student pubs on Rudolfskai stay open later, but anyone who wants a club takes the train to Munich.

Salzburg has the Alps on its doorstep. The Mönchsberg and Kapuzinerberg are wooded ridges right in the centre, and the Untersberg cable car takes you up to limestone trails at about 1,800m. The Salzkammergut lakes and Berchtesgaden National Park are within an hour.

Wroclaw is flat. Its green space is the river channels and islands, Szczytnicki Park and the botanical garden. For real hiking you need Ślęża, a lone hill an hour away, or a two-hour drive to the Karkonosze and the Table Mountains.

Salzburg's day trips are the better known: Hallstatt on its strip of lakeshore, the salt mine at Hallein, St Wolfgang, the clifftop fortress at Werfen and Berchtesgaden over the border, with Munich within reach by train. Lower Silesia around Wroclaw is less famous but full of castles and churches, from Książ above its wooded gorge to the wooden Churches of Peace at Świdnica and Jawor. From either city, a hire car makes the best outings much easier.

Both cities are safe, compact and largely car-free, so either works with children. The difference lies in what there is to do. Salzburg has the trick fountains at Hellbrunn that soak visitors, the marionette theatre, the funicular up to the fortress and the miners' slides in the nearby salt mines. Its cobbles and steep lanes are hard going with a pushchair.

Wroclaw is flat and easy to get around with a buggy, and the dwarf hunt costs nothing. The zoo's Afrykarium, with its walk-through shark tunnel, is something Salzburg has no answer to.

You can see most of either centre on foot. Beyond that, Salzburg relies on trolleybuses and buses, which reach Hellbrunn and the Untersberg cable car. Wroclaw has a large tram network, which can be slow at rush hour, and a city bike scheme along the river.

Salzburg's main station has direct trains to Munich and Vienna. For its lake villages, as for Wroclaw's castles, a hire car saves a lot of time.

Salzburg has the more distinctive shopping, above all Tracht: dirndls and loden jackets, often made to measure in workshops around the old town. Add Getreidegasse under its guild signs and the farmers' market by the Andräkirche. Wroclaw's malls cover the chains, and its best souvenirs are Bolesławiec stoneware, amber and dwarf figurines, with a few vintage shops in Nadodrze. Neither city is worth a dedicated shopping trip.

Wroclaw wins outright on cost. Central hotels, milk-bar lunches, beer, trams and museums all cost a fraction of Western European prices, and the expensive places are mostly the terraces on the Market Square.

Salzburg is expensive all year, and even more so during the summer festival and Advent, when rooms are hard to find. A city card and a bed across the river help, but the same budget buys far more comfort in Wroclaw.

Salzburg is one of the great names in classical music. The summer festival brings top opera and orchestras to the Festspielhaus and the Felsenreitschule, Jedermann is performed outside the cathedral, and Mozart Week and the Easter Festival add two more seasons. For the rest of the year there are concerts at the Mozarteum and chamber recitals in the Mirabell Palace and the fortress.

Wroclaw has a solid programme of its own at the National Forum of Music and the opera house, and festivals in Wratislavia Cantans and Jazz on the Oder. It also has more jazz and indie gigs than Salzburg. Most of its theatre is in Polish, though, and it has nothing with Salzburg's festival pull.

A restful day in Salzburg might begin with a slow walk over the wooded Mönchsberg once the day-trippers have gone. It could end in the saunas of the Paracelsus Bad in the city park, where the pool looks out to the Kapuzinerberg. For proper spa treatment, the brine baths of Bad Reichenhall are twenty minutes away across the German border, and the Gastein valley, about an hour and a half south, has radon springs and Belle Époque spa hotels.

In Wroclaw, unwinding means a hotel spa, the saunas at a large indoor aquapark or a quiet afternoon on the islands, though the centre fills up on summer weekends. To take the waters you need a drive of about an hour to the pump room and spa park at Szczawno-Zdrój. For a calm break, Salzburg is the easier choice.