August 4, 2026
The Happiest Place on Earth Is in Mexico
Tulum tops the world, a 2-billion-peso war on seaweed, Mexican taxes in plain English, and the town that perfumed the world.
August in Mexico means rain in the afternoons, green hills everywhere, and a news week that ranged from seaweed to Harry Styles. My town took 176 millimetres of rain in a single 24-hour stretch this week, which is the kind of number that sounds made up until you watch the street become a river. This week also covers the one topic people ask me about most and understand least: taxes.
Trivia
Mexico City's newest airport, AIFA, just cracked the top 10 in the country for international travelers. The airport is named after a person. Who was he?
Answer at the bottom.
This Week in Mexico
- An Irish insurance company read over a million travel reviews and crowned Tulum the happiest destination on earth, with Oaxaca coming in third.
- The federal government answered a record seaweed year with a 2-billion-peso sargassum plan: more collection ships, over 30 miles of ocean barriers, and a request that travelers not cancel their Quintana Roo trips.
- Mexicans working abroad sent home $30.8 billion US in remittances in the first half of the year, up 3.1%.
- Four years after opening to mostly empty terminals, Mexico City's AIFA airport has entered the top 10 nationally for international passengers.
- Dozens of new seismic monitors are going into Mexico's northern states, a region long assumed, wrongly, to have no earthquake activity.
- The government wants phones out of schools and a higher minimum age for social media accounts, with President Sheinbaum calling it a matter of public health.
- Rising labor and materials costs have made Mexico the priciest place to build in all of Latin America.
- Harry Styles kicked off a stadium residency in Mexico City at Estadio GNP Seguros, opening with a "¡Viva México!".
- Pemex reported a 70% drop in quarterly profit, even as the state oil company keeps chipping away at its debt.
Worth Knowing: Mexican Taxes, Before You Panic
Taxes are the topic people ask me about most, so let's clear up the basics. Plenty of people have simple situations, a pension and a bank account, and they can absolutely figure it out themselves. I did. But the more moving parts you have, cross-border income, rental property, a business, the more a good cross-border tax professional earns their fee. Either way, you should know the basics, so here they are.
The first thing to understand is that Mexico has two completely separate kinds of residency. Immigration residency is the card that lets you live here. Tax residency decides where your income gets taxed. Getting one does not automatically give you the other, and plenty of people get this backwards in both directions. Some assume their new resident card means Mexico now taxes everything they earn. Others assume that because their pension or paycheque comes from back home, Mexico has no interest in them. Neither assumption is safe.
Here is the part that matters: if Mexico considers you a tax resident, which generally happens when your life is actually centered here, then Mexico generally considers your worldwide income fair game. Not just what you earn in Mexico. All of it. Whether you actually owe anything depends on tax treaties, foreign tax credits, and your specific facts.
A few terms you'll hear. SAT is Mexico's tax authority, their version of the CRA or IRS. The RFC is your Mexican tax ID number, and you'll bump into it even outside of taxes, since banks, notaries, and property transactions ask for it. A factura is an official electronic invoice, and if you ever run a business here you'll get to know them well.
Certain situations move you from "keep it in mind" to "call someone this week." Working remotely from Mexico, even for a foreign employer who pays you back home. Renting out Mexican property, including Airbnb, where the platform's withholding does not finish the job. Selling Mexican property. Having Mexican clients. Any of these puts you squarely in Mexico's tax system.
And your home country doesn't just wave goodbye. Canadians declare themselves non-resident, and that declaration is yours to make, but it has to match the facts. The CRA can look at your ties, like a house, a spouse, provincial healthcare, even a driver's licence, and disagree with you. Americans have it simpler and worse: you file US taxes for life, no matter where you live.
None of this is a reason to stay home. It's a reason to get advice before you move instead of after, when your options are still open. I've put together a fuller plain-English walkthrough, including the Canadian and American specifics, in the free tax resource on the website.
Más México
Every kitchen on earth owes a debt to a small town in Veracruz. Vanilla is the fruit of an orchid, and for centuries the only place it grew was Mexico, where the Totonac people around Papantla figured out how to cultivate and cure it. The Aztecs taxed them in vanilla beans and stirred it into their chocolate drink.
Then the Spanish took vines to Europe, planted them, and got nothing. The plants flowered and died fruitless for 300 years, because vanilla's natural pollinators, including a little stingless bee, are native to Mexico. Papantla stayed the world's only supplier, "the city that perfumed the world," until 1841, when a 12-year-old enslaved boy on a French island worked out how to pollinate the flowers by hand. Each bloom opens for a single day.
Madagascar grows most of the world's vanilla now. But every pod, everywhere, descends from a Mexican orchid.
If Mexico is on your mind for more than a vacation, the free resources at movetomexiconavigator.com cover the rest of the picture too: residency, healthcare, housing, and how to plan the move in the right order.
Trivia Answer
AIFA stands for Aeropuerto Internacional Felipe Ángeles. Felipe Ángeles was a revolutionary general, an artillery expert who fought alongside Pancho Villa and was executed in 1919. A century later, his name is on departure boards.
Nos vemos (See you).
Corey
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