San Miguel de Allende: The World’s Best City for Expats Who Put Down Roots

San Miguel de Allende: The World’s Best City for Expats Who Put Down Roots
San Miguel: A city where expats put down roots and feel at home.|©iStock/Alexcrab

San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, has done it again. This historic gem in the Colonial Highlands was just named the No. 1 city in the world in Travel + Leisure’s 2025 World’s Best Awards, a recognition it has earned multiple times before.

For travelers and future expats alike, it’s easy to see why. San Miguel’s cobblestone streets, rainbow-hued facades, lively plazas, and rich arts scene draw visitors from around the globe. But the deeper reason so many stay? It’s a place where, despite the crowds and rising popularity, expats who genuinely want to connect and contribute can still find a warm welcome.

Yet, the timing of this win feels more telling than ever. While headlines swirl about protests against overtourism in Mexico City, where local residents have taken to the streets to push back against rising rents and waves of digital nomads, San Miguel stands in striking contrast.

The difference? A deep-rooted foreign community that’s learned, over more than seventy years, how to truly integrate, and local residents who, in turn, have embraced newcomers who respect what makes this place so special.

Longtime resident Patrice Wynne knows this firsthand. “When I came to San Miguel de Allende, something inside me just opened up. I felt like this was my home. I could make a very beautiful life here,” she says. That sense of belonging drew her from Berkeley, California, nearly twenty-five years ago, and she’s never looked back.

Patrice describes San Miguel as a place where kindness and everyday warmth are just a part of life. “I’m always amazed and appreciate the natural affection that comes from the Mexican people. My doctor hugs me and genuinely cares; it’s a natural affection that comes from living in Mexico. I love that element of touch.”

Of course, no city is immune to the tensions that come when new arrivals change the cost of living and reshape local neighborhoods. Patrice doesn’t sugarcoat this reality: “Possibly because San Miguel has had a foreign community for 70 years and there is not as sharp a rise in the presence of immigrants, we have not seen the overt resentment.”

The city’s steady evolution has helped. “The slower gentrification has made San Miguel’s Centro Histórico a shoppers’ and dining paradise aimed at tourists, the vast majority of whom are Mexican. This fact surprises people, San Miguel tourism is thriving with Mexican middle class and upscale tourists,” she says.

San Miguel: Mexico’s welcoming, artsy highland city where expats feel at home.
San Miguel: Mexico’s welcoming, artsy highland city where expats feel at home.|©Ronan McMahon

Yet even in San Miguel, locals keep a watchful eye on whether new expats act like entitled visitors or humble neighbors. Social media can be a flashpoint. “The only place I’ve read anti-American sentiment is on social media FB groups, but hostile comments are often challenged by local Mexicans who argue against the negativity expressed, instead praising the foreigners they know as friends, neighbors, and employers. Frankly, a not inconsequential number of the hostile comments are from people who live outside San Miguel and are professional provocateurs. Easy to verify this on Facebook.”

Patrice’s own life here shows what’s possible when you do things differently. After closing her bookstore in Berkeley in the late ‘90s, she came to Mexico to reinvent herself. “I always wanted to live in a Latin American country. I love the language, the people, the music, and the food. So, when I closed my bookstore, I was sad but saw it as an opportunity, a gift to restructure and reinvent my life,” she explains.

Her business, Abrazos, was born out of a partnership with local seamstresses. “My reason for calling the store Abrazos is that to me, it represented the embrace that the Mexican people have for the foreign community of San Miguel and the heart-to-heart embrace the foreigners have for this culture,” she says. Today, Abrazos supports dozens of local families through fair-trade employment, a testament to how giving back strengthens the bonds between expats and locals.

Patrice offers her clear advice for how newcomers can stay welcome in a place that’s been generous enough to grant them a second chance:

  • Learn Spanish. Locals appreciate when you make the effort.

  • Be humble and grateful. Remember, living here is a privilege, not an entitlement.

  • Pay fairly and tip well. Good service deserves good pay.

  • Shop locally and be a good neighbor.

  • Give back. Many expats here volunteer or support local charities — San Miguel has over 100 nonprofits providing social services.

  • Make local friends. Listen to their perspectives. Integration goes both ways.

And perhaps most importantly, expats who thrive here do so because they see themselves not as privileged outsiders, but as immigrants who have been invited in. “Fact of life: I am an immigrant. I no longer call myself an expat, which implies being a vagabond searching for a better life. I have found it in my new country, which graciously and generously has granted me immigrant status. It’s a privilege, not an entitlement, to live in Mexico and especially San Miguel.”

Patrice and Ernesto.
Patrice and Ernesto.

Reflecting on San Miguel’s resilience and its neighborly heart, she sums it up best: “This is a community where the majority of immigrants have lived for many, many years and are not swooping in with their expensive computers to work for high wages but where they have ROOTS, and lastly where there are over a hundred nonprofit organizations begun by foreigners that do social service work in the countryside and city — well, there’s no comparison between San Miguel and Mexico City!”

Roots… that’s the real magic behind San Miguel’s lasting appeal. Yes, it’s beautiful. Yes, it’s vibrant. But it’s also a place where you can build genuine, respectful ties with your hosts. For those seeking a graceful landing abroad, that’s what makes it the best city in the world, again.

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