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Why Mexico
Mexico was the first place I went when I decided to fully leave the UK during Covid. All I’d heard about was spring break, tacos, and the cartel headlines, but nothing you’ve heard from outside the country tells you anything about what it’s actually like to spend time there. The real Mexico is colonial cities with better coffee than anywhere in Europe, food that ruins every other cuisine for you, and a cost of living that means your money goes about twice as far as it does back home. Also, you’ll discover a whole world of art and music that you didn’t even know existed. Shazam was my most used app in Mexico, and their music will forever be with me now. If you’re American, flights are cheap and time zones are practically the same. Every tourist hub has a digital nomad community and I met loads of Americans living there working remotely. If your job is based on British time though, you’ll be starting work at silly o’ clock which can be a dealbreaker long term.
Mexico is not a one-note country. You’ve got the chaos and culture of Mexico City, the colonial calm of Oaxaca and Mérida, jungle ruins in Chiapas, and beach towns on both coasts. Whether you’re here for two weeks or two years, there’s enough range that you won’t get bored. Mexicans told me numerous times that Mexico is a whole world in itself, and I would completely agree.
Visas: What You Actually Need
Here’s the bit everyone gets confused about. Mexico doesn’t have a dedicated “digital nomad visa” the way Portugal or Spain does. What it has is a Temporary Resident Visa, and that’s the one nomads actually use.
If you’re just passing through, most Western passport holders (UK, US, Canada, and EU) get up to 180 days on arrival with no visa needed and no income proof required. You get stamped in at the airport or border and that’s it. Worth noting the exact number of days is at the discretion of the immigration officer, so don’t assume you’ll automatically get the full 180. It’s worth sorting an eSIM before you fly so you land with data already working, I have used Airalo for this. Saily is a good alternative as well, from the same team behind NordVPN.
If you want to stay longer term, you can apply for the Temporary Resident Visa at a Mexican consulate in your home country before you travel, not after you arrive. You’ll need to show either:
- Around £3,250 a month in income over the last few months, or
- Around £55,000 in savings or investments
These figures are adjusted periodically, since Mexico rebased the calculation to its UMA unit, so treat them as a guide and double check the current figures before you apply. The visa is granted for a year initially, and it’s renewable up to four years total, after which you can apply for permanent residency.
One important note: this visa requires your income to come from outside Mexico. It’s built for remote workers and people with foreign income, not for taking a local job.
Whichever route you take, if you are travelling for more than a month it’s probably worth sorting proper nomad-friendly travel insurance. Mexico’s private hospitals and clinics are genuinely good, but the good ones are expensive, so if you break your leg or something you might have to fork out a few grand, and a lot of standard travel policies won’t cover you properly for a stay stretching past a few weeks. Its worth looking at long-term insurance like SafetyWing if you’re travelling around, might want to cross borders, and don’t really know when you’re coming back. You can get a pay-monthly policy for medical and evacuation cover, lost luggage, etc. Anything can happen in Mexico and it’s definitely worth thinking about.
Cost of Living
This is one of Mexico’s strong points. You can live comfortably on £750 to £1,200 a month as a single person, depending on where you base yourself.
Mexico City: £900 to £1,350/month. The most expensive place in the country by a distance, but still cheap by US or European standards. However, despite the slightly more expensive accommodation, the food scene is abundant and affordable. A one-bedroom apartment in Roma Norte, Condesa, or Polanco (the tourist-heavy neighbourhoods) costs £550 to £1,050 depending on how nice you want it. It’s a good idea to do a couple of days in a hotel somewhere before you commit to an area. Booking.com is my go to for short stays.
Oaxaca: roughly £600 a month, the cheapest of the popular tourist cities, and about 35-40% cheaper than Mexico City. Search places to stay in Oaxaca on Booking.com.
Mérida: £600 to £900/month. A one-bedroom in the historic centro costs £450 to £600. Safe, calm, colonial, and increasingly popular with remote workers who want the culture without the chaos of the capital. Booking.com covers the historic centro well if you want to scope it out in person first.
On the ground, day to day costs look something like this: street tacos for a pound or two each, a proper sit-down dinner for £8 to £17, and specialty coffee for £2 to £3.
Where to Base Yourself, and Where to Actually Eat
Mexico City
The full experience: incredible food scene, museums, nightlife, and a genuinely huge remote work and expat community so you’ll never struggle to find people doing the same thing you are. Internet is solid, coworking spaces are everywhere, and you can go months without repeating a restaurant.
For somewhere to actually stay, La Valise Mexico City is the standout in Roma Norte, small, design-led, and genuinely unusual (one room has a bed that rolls out onto a private balcony for stargazing). Worth booking well ahead given how small it is.
A handful of currently well-regarded spots worth building a visit around: Contramar, a Roma Norte institution rated close to the top of the entire city on Google (whole grilled fish split down the middle, two sauces, always busy, book ahead or go early). Rosetta, widely considered one of the most important restaurants in the city, elegant Italian-Mexican cooking in a beautiful Roma Norte townhouse. Lardo, from the same team, more casual, wood-fired, great for lunch. Madre Café for brunch, and Orinoco if you just want excellent casual tacos without the fuss. For genuinely special-occasion dining, XUNA holds a Michelin star and reimagines Mexican cuisine in a way that’s hard to describe until you’ve had it.
Oaxaca
Something slower and cheaper without giving up culture. Famous for mezcal, markets, and some of the best regional food in the country. It’s smaller than Mexico City, so it’s easier to actually get to know the place. Quinta Real Oaxaca is a small colonial-townhouse hotel right in the centro histórico, rooftop terrace with Sierra Norte views and its own mezcal bar.
Eat at Casa Oaxaca for the best mole negro in the city (book ahead), Criollo, from chefs Luis Arellano and Enrique Olvera, for a modern take on local, seasonal ingredients, and Itanoní if you want to understand why Oaxacan corn has a cult following, everything on the menu is built around heirloom masa ground in-house. For something cheaper and more casual, Mercado 20 de Noviembre is the market to just wander and eat your way through.
Beyond the city, Monte Albán (the old Zapotec capital, built on a flattened mountaintop, give it two to three hours minimum and go early before the heat and the crowds), Hierve el Agua (petrified mineral waterfalls and natural pools about 90 minutes out), and Santiago Matatlán, the self-declared mezcal capital of the world, where you can visit a working palenque and meet the people actually making it, are all worth the day trip. If you’d rather not sort logistics yourself, this half-day Monte Albán tour on Klook covers the site with transport included.
Mérida
Safety and calm as the priority. Consistently rated one of the safest cities in Mexico, colonial architecture, close to cenotes and the coast, and a growing nomad scene without the intensity of the capital. If you want to properly splurge for a night or two, Chablé Yucatán is a former hacienda just outside the city with a spa built into a natural cenote, well beyond the everyday budget this section is built around, but worth knowing about.
Calle 47, the restaurant row renovated a couple of years back, is the easiest way to eat well without much planning, a four-block stretch that includes Oliva Enoteca, 130 Grados Steakhouse and Micaela Mar y Leña. For tacos, Wayan’e is a local favourite (the crispy pork belly castacán is the move). Mercado 60 turns into an open-air food court most evenings, worth timing your visit for after 9pm when it properly comes alive with music.
Playa del Carmen and Tulum
Beach life with decent infrastructure, though be aware both have got significantly more expensive and built up in recent years than their reputation suggests. Booking.com and Agoda are both full of options across Tulum’s beach zone and Playa’s town centre. For somewhere specific, La Zebra sits right on one of the best stretches of Tulum’s beach road and is a genuinely welcoming, family-friendly pick if you want beachfront without the more exclusive, adults-only feel some of Tulum’s hotels lean into.
It’s a bit dangerous driving yourself round the whole of Mexico, but I did rent a car to explore the Yucatan peninsula, which was absolutely fine. Localrent covers pickup across the Riviera Maya area, the easiest way to actually see cenotes and ruins beyond Tulum and Playa on your own schedule.
In Tulum, Hartwood basically put the town on the international food map, live-fire cooking under rustic wooden pergolas, and it still requires booking well ahead. Arca and Mestixa (Michelin-recognised) both draw on Mayan ingredients and technique in genuinely inventive ways, and DelCielo does what’s widely considered the best breakfast in town if you can get there before the weekend rush. In Playa del Carmen, Cantina Don PP is the one to seek out if you want an authentic, unpretentious cantina experience rather than the more tourist-facing strip along Quinta Avenida.
Safety: The Honest Version
This is the question everyone asks and the one that’s hardest to answer with a single sentence, because it depends entirely on where you are. Mexico as a whole is regarded with “exercise increased caution”, but that blanket rating hides huge regional variation.
A handful of states carry “do not travel” warnings, mostly ones you’re unlikely to have any reason to visit as a traveller or nomad: Colima, Guerrero, Michoacán, Tamaulipas, and Zacatecas. Meanwhile the places nomads and tourists actually go, Mexico City, Oaxaca, Mérida, Cancún, Los Cabos, are operating completely normally and see millions of visitors a year without incident.
The practical takeaway: don’t judge the whole country by headlines about specific states you weren’t planning to visit anyway. Check the current advisory for your actual destination, use common sense (don’t flash valuables, use registered taxis, don’t wander around unfamiliar areas late at night), and you’ll have the same experience as the millions of other people who visit and live here without issue.
A personal note on the police
I want to be straight with you about something that happened to me twice, on two separate occasions, in two different parts of the country: I was stopped and searched by police, and cash was taken from me both times.
I’m not saying this to scare you off, and it’s not the experience most travellers have. But it’s real, it happens, and it’s not something most guides are honest about. Police corruption at the street level is a genuine, well-documented issue in Mexico, and carrying a wallet full of cash makes you a target for it in a way that isn’t really about your safety, it’s about opportunity. If you get pulled aside for a search, there’s a real chance that whatever cash is on you doesn’t all make it back into your pocket.
The solution is simple: only carry the cash you actually need for that day or outing, keep the rest at home, and treat a police stop the way you’d treat any encounter with someone who might not have your best interests at heart, calm, cooperative, and with as little of value on you as possible. It’s not a reason to avoid Mexico. It’s a reason to carry less cash than your instinct might tell you to.
On the cartel question
People ask about this a lot, so I’ll give you my honest, personal read rather than a sanitised non-answer. This isn’t something I can back up with data, just what it felt like on the ground, particularly in Playa del Carmen, where I got the strong impression that a lot of the local business ecosystem operates with some degree of cartel involvement.
Here’s the counterintuitive part: that impression didn’t make me feel less safe as a tourist, if anything, the opposite. Tourism is a valuable business model, and cartels have every incentive to keep things running smoothly and keep tourists spending money without incident. Trouble that scares off visitors is bad for everyone’s business, including theirs. That’s obviously not a reason to be relaxed about it, and it’s genuinely more of an observation about why tourist zones stay calm than any kind of endorsement or reassurance.
Where this can turn dangerous is if you go looking for drugs. They’re openly offered on the street in pretty much every tourist hotspot in the country, and it’s one of the more reliable ways to end up somewhere you don’t want to be, or dealing with people you really don’t want to be dealing with. I strongly advise against getting involved, regardless of how casual the offer seems. Stick to what you can see and verify (licensed bars, restaurants, tours), and steer well clear of anything offered to you on the street.
Best Time to Visit
Dry season is from November to April, and that’s when you’ll get the most predictable weather and clear roads for travelling around. For the best value, though, the shoulder months of April-May and October-November hit a sweet spot: fewer crowds, lower prices, and still excellent weather across most of the country.
Hurricane season is from June to October, and it mainly affects the Caribbean coast, so Cancún, the Riviera Maya, and Veracruz. If you’re planning to be inland or on the Pacific side during those months you’re generally fine.
A Sample Route (2-4 Weeks)
If you’ve got two weeks, fly into Mexico City and spend a solid four days there before heading out. From there:
Mexico City → Oaxaca → San Cristóbal de las Casas → Palenque → Mérida → Valladolid → Tulum → fly out from Cancún
That route gives you the capital, colonial towns, jungle ruins, Yucatán culture, cenotes, and beach, without doubling back on yourself.
With three to four weeks, add in Palenque’s waterfalls, and Chichén Itzá, which you can book a tour to cover the lot (this Chichén Itzá, cenote and Valladolid tour on Klook covers all three with a tequila tasting thrown in), and if you’ve got the extra days, Isla Holbox off the north coast, which is one of the best places in the country to actually switch off. White sand beaches, island vibes, and street parties.
Getting around: buses are the backbone of travel in Mexico: cheap, reliable, and comfortable on the long-haul routes (ADO is the main operator worth knowing). Renting a car gives you more flexibility if you want to explore beyond the main towns, particularly around the Yucatán where distances between sites can be awkward on public transport.
Beyond the Yucatán
Mexico City deserves more than a stopover, it’s genuinely one of the greatest food and culture cities in the world, not just a gateway to the beaches.
Oaxaca and its surrounding valley, mezcal country, Zapotec ruins, and some of the best markets in the country, rewards slowing down for at least four or five days.
Puebla, often overlooked in favour of Oaxaca, has its own distinct colonial architecture, is the birthplace of mole poblano, and makes an easy add-on if you’re routing through central Mexico.
San Cristóbal de las Casas, up in the Chiapas highlands, is cooler, quieter, and culturally distinct from the rest of the country, with a strong indigenous Maya presence and easy access to the Sumidero Canyon and Palenque’s ruins.
The Bottom Line
Mexico is one of the easiest places in the world to base yourself if you’re working remotely: cheap, close to the US, genuinely stunning in places, and with an established enough nomad and expat scene that you won’t be figuring everything out alone. The safety headlines put a lot of people off unnecessarily, and the honest picture is more nuanced than either the scare stories or the tourist-board version, carry less cash than you think you need, use common sense around anything offered to you on the street, and stick to the well-travelled cities and regions. Do that, and it’s one of the best value destinations going, with some of the best food you’ll eat anywhere in the world along the way.