A Destination Wedding Guide to Mexico

Why Mexico

The Riviera Maya makes our top ten destination wedding locations as the easiest big-group wedding on the list, and it is: resorts with whole wedding departments, a beach that looks photoshopped, and an airport with flights from practically everywhere. But the Caribbean coast is only one of Mexico's personalities. There's the desert-meets-ocean drama of Los Cabos, the jungle-backed bays around Puerto Vallarta, and a colonial hill town in the middle of the country where weddings come with a marching band and giant dancing puppets.

What ties it all together is that Mexicans throw a magnificent party. Weddings here run late, loud and generous: mariachis, mezcal, a dance floor that never empties, and a whole cast of godparents who each sponsor a piece of the celebration. And for anyone flying in from the US or Canada, it's a short hop to a different world — which is why your RSVP rate will be better than you fear.

If you're weighing a longer haul, our Thailand guide has limestone cliffs and lantern-lit receptions — but I'm staying where the cenotes are.

Where to stay (and say “I do”)

The Riviera Maya and Tulum — for the Caribbean

The coast south of Cancún is wedding headquarters: white sand, water in four shades of turquoise, and the jungle pressing right up behind the beach. At the polished end, Rosewood Mayakoba sits among mangrove lagoons where guests can arrive at the reception by boat; at the barefoot end, Tulum's beach hotels and jungle venues do candlelit ceremonies under palm-thatch roofs. In between are the big all-inclusives, which are the secret weapon for large guest lists: one booking covers rooms, meals, drinks and a wedding coordinator, so nobody's chasing receipts. The ruins of Tulum stand on a cliff right above the sea — you can't marry there, but you can take your photos nearby — and Chichén Itzá and a hundred cenotes are a day trip away.

Los Cabos — for the drama

At the very tip of Baja California, the desert runs straight into the ocean. Cactus-covered hills, granite cliffs, and El Arco, the rock arch at Land's End where the Sea of Cortez meets the Pacific. The corridor between Cabo San Lucas and San José del Cabo is lined with serious resorts: One&Only Palmilla is famous for hosting just one wedding a day, and Esperanza does intimate clifftop ceremonies above the sea. A warning: much of the Pacific side has powerful surf and isn't safe for swimming, so check the beach before you promise guests a dip. For something bohemian, the old mission town of Todos Santos is about an hour up the coast.

San Miguel de Allende — for the fiesta

This is the one that made me cry a little. San Miguel is a colonial hill town in the highlands, a UNESCO World Heritage Site of cobbled lanes and saffron, terracotta and ox-blood walls, all crowned by the pink neo-Gothic spires of the Parroquia de San Miguel Arcángel. It hosts hundreds of weddings a year, and almost all of them include a callejoneada: a parade through the streets behind a brass band and mojigangas, giant papier-mâché puppets often made to look like the bride and groom. Rosewood San Miguel de Allende and Belmond Casa de Sierra Nevada are the classic hotel venues, and there are restored haciendas and vineyards in the countryside around. It sits at around 1,900 metres, so evenings are cool — pack a shawl, not a sarong.

Puerto Vallarta and Punta Mita — for the jungle-meets-ocean

On the Pacific coast, the Banderas Bay is ringed by the green Sierra Madre, so you get beach and mountains in the same view. Puerto Vallarta's old town has cobbled streets and a lively malecón for the welcome-night crawl. At the bay's northern tip, Punta Mita is the luxury enclave, with the Four Seasons and the St. Regis both doing beach weddings; up the coast, surfy Sayulita is where the after-party wants to go. From December to around March, humpback whales come into the bay to breed, and you can watch them breach from the ceremony.

Two honourable mentions: Oaxaca, for food lovers and mezcal people, with colonial courtyards and the petrified waterfalls of Hierve el Agua nearby; and the restored henequen haciendas around Mérida in the Yucatán, which are some of the most romantic venues in the country.

1. 1 Tulum stay & marry
2. 2 Los Cabos stay & marry
3. 3 Puerto Vallarta stay & marry
4. 4 San Miguel de Allende stay & marry
5. 5 Copper Canyon adventure
6. 6 San Ignacio Lagoon adventure
7. 7 Cancún fly into

Beyond the ceremony

Mexico is built for the days either side of the wedding. Here's my list.

• Swim (or dive) the cenotes. The Yucatán has no rivers on the surface; the water runs underground through limestone caves that open up as cenotes, thousands of them. Near Tulum, Gran Cenote and Dos Ojos are crystal-clear for snorkelling, and certified divers can do guided cavern dives into the light beams. Go early, before the tour buses, and use reef-safe sunscreen or none at all.
• Swim with whale sharks. From roughly June to September, the biggest fish in the sea gather to feed off Isla Holbox and Isla Mujeres. Licensed boats take small groups out to slip into the water beside them — gentle, enormous and totally uninterested in you.
• Meet the grey whales. From around January to April, grey whales calve in the lagoons on Baja's Pacific coast. At San Ignacio Lagoon, curious mothers famously bring their calves right up to the little boats to be touched. It's a long journey up the peninsula, so make it a post-wedding trip, not a day out.
• Ride the train into Copper Canyon. In the Sierra Madre, the El Chepe railway climbs from the coast into a system of canyons often described as bigger than the Grand Canyon. At Divisadero there's an adventure park on the rim with zip lines, a cable car and a via ferrata hanging over the drop.
• Get up early for the pyramids. Be at Chichén Itzá when the gates open, before the heat and the crowds; or, if you're coming through Mexico City, take a sunrise hot-air balloon over the Pyramids of the Sun and Moon at Teotihuacán.

“A morning in a flooded cave, an afternoon on a Maya pyramid, a night under a palapa with a mariachi band — Mexico doesn't make you choose.

When to go, month by month

Mexico is big enough that the weather depends on the coast, but the wedding calendar is surprisingly simple: December to April is dry and sunny almost everywhere, and from June the rains and the hurricane risk build. The table below uses typical daytime highs for Cancún and the Riviera Maya; Los Cabos is a couple of degrees cooler from December to April but drier all year, and San Miguel de Allende, up in the highlands, runs several degrees cooler by day, with chilly nights in December and January. Price runs from $ (low-season bargain) to $$$ (peak).

Two honest warnings. First, hurricane season officially runs from 1 June to 30 November on the Caribbean side (from mid-May on the Pacific), with the greatest risk from August to October; a direct hit is unlikely on any given weekend, but plan a weather backup and check what your venue and insurance actually cover. Second, sargassum — rafts of brown seaweed that wash up on the Caribbean coast. It varies wildly from year to year, but it typically arrives around April or May, is at its worst from June to August, and can linger into October or November. Resorts clear their beaches every morning and some put out barriers, but if a pristine beach is the whole point, book December to March. The Pacific coast doesn't get it at all.

Getting there

Cancún International (CUN) is the gateway to the Caribbean coast: around four hours from New York, three to four from much of the US, and about ten and a half to eleven hours direct from London. Tulum's newer airport (TQO), opened in 2023, saves a drive but has far fewer routes. On the Pacific side, Los Cabos (SJD) and Puerto Vallarta (PVR) are both roughly two and a half to three hours from Los Angeles, with plenty of direct flights from across North America. For San Miguel de Allende, fly into León (BJX) or Querétaro (QRO) and drive an hour to an hour and a half. Mexico City (MEX) connects everything, with direct flights from Europe. From Dubai expect one stop, usually in Europe; from Sydney, one stop on the US West Coast.

The beauty of a Mexico wedding is that most guests can do it in a long weekend; the challenge is that they'll all do it differently — some flying direct, some via Mexico City, a few tacking on a week in Tulum. Collect flights and hotels as part of the RSVP rather than chasing them by message, so the airport transfers practically plan themselves. Our guide to organising guest travel covers the system.

The paperwork (and the party)

A legal civil wedding in Mexico is possible for foreign couples, but there is no single national rulebook: each state's civil registry (Registro Civil) sets its own requirements, and a judge from it performs the ceremony. Typically you'll need passports and proof of legal entry, birth certificates with apostilles and an official Spanish translation, and witnesses with ID — two in some states, four in others, including Quintana Roo, home to the Riviera Maya. Some states still ask for a medical certificate or blood test done in Mexico; others have dropped it. Plan to arrive a few working days early, and expect to apostille and translate the Mexican certificate for home. Because of all that, plenty of couples sign the legal papers at home and have a symbolic ceremony in Mexico. A Catholic church wedding adds its own paperwork and months of notice. Same-sex marriage has been legal in all 32 states since 2022.

And then the party. Mexican weddings are full of padrinos and madrinas — godparents who sponsor everything from the rings to the band. During the ceremony, one couple loops el lazo, a silk cord or oversized rosary, around your shoulders in a figure of eight; another presents las arras, thirteen coins that the groom hands to the bride as a promise to provide. Later, there's the mariachi, a tequila toast, and la víbora de la mar, where the newlyweds stand on chairs to form a bridge and every guest snakes beneath them at speed until someone falls off. Then there's the tornaboda, the next-day party for everyone who survived the first one. I intend to fall off a chair.

I came for the cenotes and found everything else: a desert at the end of the world, a hill town that parades you to the altar, whales off both coasts and pyramids in the jungle. Once you've picked your Mexico, work through the practical sequence — budget, timeline, guest logistics — in our ultimate destination wedding planning guide. I'll be the one in the cenote the morning after, giving my husband the right hand signal at last.