In reply to The New NickB: blimey, the list of potential places is huge! how long have you got? I've been to Barcelona and Dubrovnik, both nice but very different. Barca a major city with easily more than a week's worth of stuff to see, diverse areas with different characters, good food and a real vibrant atmosphere. Dubrovnik is much smaller - you can do the old town and walls in a day to be honest and although very pretty there wasn't a huge amount of stuff to see for more than, say, 2-3 days, without travelling. Interesting history, obviously - if you do go, check out the civil war museum on the hill overlooking the town, reached by cable car or a very winding path (tells the story of the battle for the city, obviously from a very pro-Croation POV but that's understandable I guess!). Food, IME, less good than Barca. Palermo, as has been mentioned, is also fascinating, doesn't have a beach but there are trains to nearby resorts. Or try Marseille, Nice, Alicante, Malaga... It partly depends on how much time you want to spend doing city sightseeing, and how much lying on the beach. If this was me, I'd just do a trawl of the places that budget airlines fly to from my local airport, see which were cheapest, and pick one from those.
