9 August 2026
We spent a morning replanting at the Playa 72 access with Consciencia Viva. This piece came out of it: the community that holds this city together, and how to find your way into it.
Last Sunday we were replanting at the access path to Playa 72, alongside Consciencia Viva and other people from the city. There were people who've been here all their lives and people who arrived six months ago. Mexicans from several states, foreigners from several countries. All of us holding a spade.
We kept thinking about it for the rest of the day, and this piece came out of it.
Playa 72 is the pet-friendly beach of Playa del Carmen, the only one in the city. That's where the dogs go to run and get in the water, and that's where their people go.
What isn't always known is that the space is largely maintained by community effort. No institutional team shows up to plant trees on a Sunday: neighbours, collectives and volunteers show up, organised over social media, and turn out.
Playa 72 is part of a strip of jungle and mangrove that people here call the Last Green Lung of Playa del Carmen, out towards the Luis Donaldo Colosio neighbourhood. Residents and civil society organisations are working to have it recognised as a Protected Natural Area. It's a long process, sustained by signatures, work days and turning up.
We mention it because it says a lot about how this city works: the things worth having here are held up by the community.
It's one of the things we like most about living here, and one of the least talked about.
Playa del Carmen is made of people who came from somewhere else. Mexicans from Chiapas, Tabasco, Yucatán, Mexico City, the north. And a sizeable international community: Argentines, Italians, French, Colombians, Canadians, Americans, Venezuelans.
That makes it unusually easy to fit in. Almost nobody has always been from here, so almost nobody treats you as the newcomer. Conversations start on their own, because everyone, at some point, was the new one.
It also means the city is built by everyone, in the literal sense: whoever organises the replanting, whoever runs the market stall, whoever manages your building, whoever teaches at your children's school. They all came from somewhere and decided to stay.
This is our trade and we'll say it plainly: buying an apartment in Playa del Carmen is one thing, and living Playa del Carmen is another. The good news is that the second is within reach of anyone who steps towards it.
Some people own a beautiful property and know the route from their home to Quinta Avenida and little else. After two years they leave, with the impression that the city was something other than they'd hoped.
And the opposite happens: people who arrived to rent a small studio and six months later have someone to have Sunday breakfast with, know what time the good market opens, and get greeted at the tortilla shop.
The difference is in the stepping towards, not in the square metres.
There's no formula, but there are things we've seen work:
Turn up to the work days. Replanting, beach clean-ups, collection drives. They're announced on social media and you don't need to belong to anything: you show up, you help, you meet people. It's the fastest way to stop being a stranger.
Shop where the neighbours shop. The markets, the local eateries, the tortilla shop on the corner. As well as costing considerably less than the tourist strip, it's where the conversations happen.
Learn Spanish, even a little. You can live here without it, and plenty of people do. But the city opens differently when you can talk to the fruit seller, to your building manager, to your neighbour. Much of the difference between inhabiting a place and visiting it at length runs through that.
Go to your owners' meeting. It sounds like tedious admin, and it's where you meet the people you share a roof with, and where you find out what's going to happen in your building before it happens.
Say hello. It seems small and it carries a lot. In this city people greet each other: walking into a shop, passing someone in the lift, arriving at the beach. Whoever says hello stops being a stranger within weeks.
When someone writes to us looking for somewhere to live, the first conversation isn't about budget. It's about how they want to live: whether they'll walk to work, whether they're bringing a pet, whether having neighbours to talk to matters to them, whether they want to be near the sea or near the school.
It matters to us because we work with people who see themselves here for the long term. And over the long term, what holds someone in a city is the people they met in it.
If you're thinking of moving to Playa del Carmen and want to talk it over with someone who lives here, write to us. And if you'd rather start with the other thing, ask when the next work day at Playa 72 is. You turn up in clothes you don't mind ruining and a willingness to meet someone.
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