Guadalajara a Fantasy for Big City Lovers
Saturday night at downtown's plaza and the Guadalajara Cathedral.
Updated November 2023
Fantasize the big city of your dreams
Pretend that you live in a large city in America that’s sleek and sophisticated, full of young professionals and has a booming tech/creative sector. It’s surrounded by beautiful countryside. By night, it has a glowing historic downtown, its plazas are full of music and life. By day, you can knock yourself out with shopping choices, from the budget to budget-breaking. The weather is near-perfect year round.
Let's elaborate on the fantasy, shall we?
To rent an apartment in this fantasy city costs about $1,400 a month for the toniest, high-rise apartment in the trendiest commercial district. Or you could choose an apartment for substantially less (around $700) in a quiet, yet still very lovely neighborhood, all with 24 camera surveillance and roving security.
On the weekend, you may invite a friend to dinner at a nice restaurant for about $30 (for two). Once in a while, you take in a first-run movie in a luxurious, spotless theater, where you sit in lounger seats with table service for $10 or you can go to a regular theater and see first run movies for about $3.50 dollars US. Or perhaps you spend the afternoon going to one of a number of museums.
You work out at the nicest gym you’ve ever joined (in one, each piece of equipment has a button on to push if you need assistance) for $40 a month. Your Uber ride to any concert, play, ballet, or museum probably costs less than $5 if you don’t want to drive. Or you can take public transportation that’s available to anywhere in the city. (You need only check your Moovit app for the route). Tickets to any of the numerous plays, concerts, festivals or other cultural events probably won’t cost more than $20 dollars.
Andares is Guadalajara’s most high-end shopping center.
Of course, such a place doesn’t exist in the United States. It only exists in Guadalajara, Mexico.
The Guadalajara of today has cut loose from its quaint past. Like many U.S. cities experiencing explosive growth, Guadalajara is building up, vertically, with avant garde architecture and glamorous facades. After the Mexico City earthquake in 1985, a lot of people moved to Guadalajara from Mexico City. That was the city’s first big growth wave. A new growth wave is on display here now. According to Mexico’s Forbes magazine, this growth is encouraging government partnerships to build the type of mixed-used buildings and communities that have become so popular in U.S. cities.
There’s a fresh smell in the springtime air of Guadalajara. It’s the smell of money.
Once known by tourists as the birthplace of tequila, hot sauce, and mariachi, the state of Jalisco, where Guadalajara is located, has become Mexico’s Silicon Valley. Domestic and and foreign investment is pouring in, creating a technology sector already worth $21 billion.
Big companies are encouraged by the solid infrastructure that Guadalajara has worked over two decades to build, such as it’s investment in fiber optic capacity to expand internet access. The city has a steady supply of talent from the state of Jalisco’s 25 universities and 62 technical colleges, which pump out 10,000 thousand engineers a year.
If you are in your 30’s, working remote, and making $60,000 in the United States, you need have a talk with your boss, pack a single suitcase and immediately board a plane to Guadalajara. Here you can live a $150,000-a-year lifestyle on that $60,000 and still have some left over to save and invest in your 401(k).
Co-working buildings are popping up, helpful if you want to work remotely and not be isolated in an apartment all day. The really great news is that they only run about $100 a month, a fraction of what co-working co-ops cost in the U.S. In this video, one of the growing number of digital nomad in Guadalajara shares the realities of his life in there, good neighborhoods to live in and what to expect.
Teatro Degollado in Guadalajara
With direct flights to all the major U.S. hubs, going to and from is no more difficult than going from San Francisco to New York. In fact, Guadalajara is closer to San Francisco than New York is. A round-trip ticket to Guadalajara from Denver, for example, costs about $250 dollars.
Guadalajara is nothing like what locals remember from a decade ago. Lively, upscale bars, and restaurants matching anything you’d see in the U.S. and line wide leafy avenues like Avenida Guadalupe. The young and stylish gravitate to the area around the Plaza Comercial Andares, which is one big fashion show, men and women alike. The area thumps with excitement and youthful energy.
Throngs of people listen to free concerts in the two-block-square plaza in front of the Guadalajara Cathedral downtown and enjoy traditional Mexican evenings of strolling, people watching and shopping for high-quality artisanal goods and crafts.
What I particularly love, being a night owl, is the nocturnal energy of Guadalajara, the displays of singing, dancing, even comedic presentations on the streets and sidewalks at night. People are everywhere, dwarfing anything you’d see in anywhere other than perhaps New York City.
Mix of the old and the traditional
In Guadalajara’s downtown and certain other points, you’ll find baroque architecture. In other areas, it embraces the futuristic. The city’s personality strikes the perfect balance between the more formal civility that is a natural byproduct of success and the cultural warmth that no Mexican city can suppress. Its inhabitants retain the buena onda for which Mexico is renowned.
Downtown and major plazas in Guadalajara remain traditionally Mexican in their music, mariachi, and street vendor stalls. The city has its hipster zones as well as Mexico's renowned local open markets, like Mercado Libertad. While Jalisco doesn’t have the renowned cuisine of Oaxaca and Puebla, it does have its local fare; birria, jericallas, horchata rosa, jejuino, gorditas, and tortas ahogados.
Driscoll’s, a California-based berry vender has operations here to visit if you want the freshest, largest berries available anywhere. You will not starve.
The state of Jalisco is renowned among Mexico for its beautiful people. How do they measure which region has the most beautiful people in Mexico? Beauty pageants remain popular in the country and Mexicans keep count of how many winners come from their state (I know this because the Mexican state I live in, Sinaloa, also has a high number of contestant winners).
Areas for expats to live
Guadalajara has a population of over five million people and growing. There are numerous attractive neighborhoods and expats tend to spread out among them rather than cloistering in a certain community as common in some popular expat destinations.
The most attractive neighborhoods are said to be Puerta de Hierro, Zona Real - Valle Real, Santa Anita, Providencia - Country Club, Chapultepec -Americana and Chapalita - Camino Real. The list of most desired areas according to Mexicans is a bit different, and includes the neighborhoods of Moderna, and Colinas de San Javier.
One should follow the same precautions in Guadalajara that you would in any large, unfamiliar city. In general, you can walk at night in any of the neighborhoods you would logically find yourself as an expat. People follow the rules. Police and security personnel are omnipresent in the popular neighborhoods.
My personal experience in Guadalajara leads me to believe that English isn’t as common here as it is in expat towns in Mexico such as Lake Chapala which is less than an hour away, San Miguel de Allende and popular coastal towns. (Mexico overall ranks as having the lowest level of English out of 112 selected countries).
Guadalajara has a number of beautiful parks. My absolute favorite is Bosque Los Colomos which is best known for its Japanese garden. The park is located in the heart of the city and near the neighborhood of Zapopan. (I always stay in Zapopan when I’m in Guadalajara.)
What does it cost to live in Guadalajara? In such a huge city, even in the most desired areas, the range is enormous. A house might rent out for $1,200 dollars a month, a large upscale apartment with amenities, anywhere from $550 dollars to a pricey $1,700 dollars.
Utilities are inexpensive: gas, electric, water and internet likely will run less than $150 dollars, helped by the fact that Guadalajara’s climate is temperate, without extremes in the summer and winter. Most homes have neither central heating nor air conditioning.
No matter your age, living in a large city on the move is rejuvenating. Whatever the stage of your career, the energy and enthusiasm of Guadalajara is contagious. If you’re a big city person considering a pre-retirement in Mexico and prefer big cities with all their excitement on a budget, Guadalajara unquestionably should be your first choice.
Related Links:
The surrounding area of Guadalajara provides ample hikes and other points of natural beauty as outlined in this edition of Mexico Daily News.
You can have it all in Guadalajara, because they now have Uber Eats.
Mexico News Daily tells us about beautiful Tamara Canyon, only 45 minute away from Guadalajara
A nice video tour of Guadalajara
Why you should be working remote now, before you ever move abroad. - Ventanas Mexico
More on Guadalajara's boom (in Spanish) by El Pais, one of Spain's major newspapers.
For a visit, two articles on things to do, one with highlights, one geared toward the businessmen.
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Am I strolling a neighborhood in Southern California? Nope, just an affluent area in Guadalajara.
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About the author:
I'm Kerry Baker, a partner with Ventanas Mexico and author of "If I Only Had a Place," a guide on renting for the aspiring expat. My second is “The Mexico Solution: Saving your money, sanity, and quality of life through part-time life in Mexico,’’ a how-two book with illuminating anecdotes. Most recently I published, The Lazy Expat: Healthy Recipes That Translate in Mexico, a cookbook for travelers, snowbirds and expats trying to maintain a healthy diet in Mexico.