The battle for Britons

As two of our sunshine favourites announce that they intend to welcome back British tourists this summer,

Laura Fowler is in two minds over where to go. Which will you choose in this holiday head-to-head?

The first flight I ever took was to Mallorca, aged 13. We awoke to a golden morning on the north-east coast, with steps down to a cove of fine sand and limpid, turquoise shallows, bath-warm. They couldn’t get us out of the water, our parents – after a lifetime of the toenumbing Atlantic we had never known anything like it.

My sister and I found other children and we roamed the beaches and pine forests in a pack, hungry for adventure and first love. It was heaven. If there was a place on earth to rival Spain for summer holidays, I couldn’t imagine it. But, as it turned out, there was.

Although I don’t have a single photograph of my first holiday to Greece, a few years later the memory remains pin-sharp: white heat and vibrant Aegean; domed whitewashed churches and blue-shuttered fishing villages; the pale stone remains of its great civilisation framing an azure sky, where we partied amid the antiquity.

Spain has shimmering costas: miles of sand and sun loungers along the Med and Andalucia’s wilder Atlantic. Greece has drama in the green-forested fingers of its Peloponnese, cliffs plunging down to pebble shores.

Spain has siestas and fiestas, passion and baroque splendour in its art and architecture, its music and dancing; spice and saffron in its flavourful tapas.

Greece, despite the weight of all that history, has a light-as-air simplicity, from its clean, fresh seafood and salads to its carefree way of life that liberates British holidaymakers into Shirley Valentines, septuagenarian National Trust members pootling around its herbscented isles on mopeds, limber from so much olive oil and sunshine, while our children burst out of their shells to go leaping off jetties with the locals.

So then, which will it be? Which of these two many-splendoured countries, when they open their sun-kissed arms to British travellers again, will we run to first this summer? After such a long absence, it’s a happy dilemma. Let our experts help you decide, as they fight it out in the battle for Britons.