🇲🇽 San Miguel de Allende: Why It Still Deserves the World’s Best City Award 2025
- GSS Staff
- Nov 3
- 3 min read
The Mexican highland city keeps earning global recognition, not because it is perfect, but because it continues to function as a living, adaptive community.
San Miguel de Allende’s name appears frequently in travel rankings. Its latest recognition—World’s Best City 2025 by Travel + Leisure—places it once again at the top of global lists. Awards often highlight architecture, art, and climate, but San Miguel’s value lies in how it continues to operate as a working city in the middle of international attention.
Located in the state of Guanajuato, the city stands at roughly 6,000 feet above sea level. Its size—about 175,000 residents—keeps activity dense but manageable. Streets remain narrow, markets stay central, and most errands are still completed on foot. This walkable design, along with the altitude’s temperate air, creates conditions that support physical and social well-being without the need for dedicated wellness infrastructure.
Tourism drives a large share of the local economy, and that success brings visible pressure. Real-estate prices have risen, English is now commonly spoken in downtown, and international ownership is expanding. Critics point to gentrification and a concentration of wealth that did not exist two decades ago. These observations are valid, but they do not erase the systems that continue to anchor daily life. Local food supply chains remain short, community markets open before dawn, and artisan workshops across Colonia Guadalupe and San Antonio employ families who have worked in the same trades for generations.
This continuity gives San Miguel resilience. While parts of the center cater to visitors, the city’s institutions—its schools, cooperatives, and public festivals—still operate for residents first. Independence Day, Semana Santa, and the San Miguel Arcángel celebration remain civic events. Public plazas are used throughout the week, and small libraries and cultural groups continue to host programs in Spanish for local children. These practices sustain a civic structure that exists beyond the tourist frame.
Boutique hotels and restaurants have also learned to reflect that balance. Properties such as Casa de Sierra Nevada and Hotel Matilda source materials and labor locally, integrate art from regional studios, and employ staff who live within the city. The hospitality sector’s shift toward community hiring and environmental certification indicates a more grounded model of luxury—measured by contribution.
Wellness in San Miguel de Allende draws from long-standing Mexican traditions as much as from modern spa culture. Temazcal ceremonies, guided by local healers using volcanic stones and medicinal herbs, remain part of the city’s wellness landscape and are offered in community centers and boutique retreats across the outskirts. Herbal-medicine workshops, yoga terraces, and sound-therapy sessions have become common at properties like Feel Urban Spa at Live Aqua which integrate regional practices into structured programs. These experiences connect visitors to the cultural roots of healing in central Mexico—where wellness is social, sensory, and inherited through practice.
San Miguel’s continued recognition as the world’s best city is well deserved. It is not free of inequality or outside influence, but it manages to preserve public life, retain small business ownership, and maintain accessibility in a setting that could easily have turned exclusive.
For additional context on Mexico’s travel, cultural and wellness landscape, see Oaxaca:Top Experiences, Dining and Essential Tips and Mexico City Travel Guide: Best Attractions, Family Fun & Vegetarian Eats
