During the pandemic, Mexico was one of few countries to keep its borders open, taking a comparatively laissez-faire approach towards Covid-19 in order to to safeguard the economy. Tens of thousands of digital nomads, mostly ‘gringos’ from North America, flocked to the country. The increasing desirability of living in Mexico City, the ‘metropolis that has it all’ named the world’s top travel destination by the New York Times in 2016, went into overdrive.
A notorious, albeit usually short lived, downside for first time travellers to the city is the so-called Montezuma’s Revenge – the gastrointestinal inconvenience that new arrivals unaccustomed to Mexico's cuisine and water quality sometimes experience. Montezuma was the Aztec emperor who more than 500 years ago died after being placed under house arrest by Hernán Cortés’s Spanish conquistadors. The invaders – allied with local rivals of the Aztecs – then conquered the city of Tenochititlán, in the northeast of today’s Mexico City, in 1521. It was one of the largest cities in the world: an advanced, affluent society and testament to the level of development reached by Mesoamerican civilizations.
