Millionaire City
How a humble town in Mexico became the richest place in the world (briefly)
Every May, The Sunday Times brings out its Rich List, their line up of the thousand wealthiest individuals or families resident in Britain. It’s a strangely repellent and yet compelling list, occasionally inspiring (in terms of philanthropic giving), often depressing (inherited wealth begetting more inherited wealth), sometimes surprising (last year Rishi Sunak came in higher than Prince Charles – I’ll leave you to decide on your emotional response). It also acts, though, as an intriguing barometer for how Britain measures up against other countries. We’re gradually shedding our billionaires as they seek other places to live. Similarly, the number of more humble millionaires is falling. London has the fifth highest concentration in the world (258k) but it’s in decline. That still gives it more than double the next two European cities put together (Frankfurt at 102k and Zurich at 99k) but the slide is undeniable.
The highest number live in New York City (340k) which means that one in twenty four of the NYC population are millionaires. Not a bad ratio but pants compared to Monaco where half of its residents are millionaires. Half. Weirdly, the highest percentage of millionaires per capita when it comes to country is not Luxembourg or Dubai, where you might think, but Iceland. 20% of the population are millionaires, which makes sense if you’ve ever tried to buy a beer there.
It's always intriguing when you get these outliers, at least to your expectations (even if it then makes perfect sense when you discover why). Iceland is wealthy because of a strong economy, a very highly educated workforce, low energy costs because of its focus on renewables and its extortionate breweries (I made up that last one). Aberdeen, up until ten years ago, would regularly come in with an even higher concentration of millionaires per population than London. This was largely because of the oil fields located just offshore but also partly because of luck, literally (they have the highest number of lottery millionaires in the country).
I’m meandering down this particular rabbit hole because I’ve just come back from visiting a city in Mexico which, for about thirty years between the end of the 19th century and the start of World War One, had the highest concentration of millionaires per capita in the world. Merida is a very typical Mexican city – a couple of large churches built by the Spanish conquistadors in the centre, a smattering of parks, a grid system of almost exclusively single storey buildings. It’s pretty and quite sleepy at the same time, though you get the sense that it’s just on the cusp of change. So, what were so many millionaires doing hanging out here?
The answer lies in a spiky plant found all over south Mexico, the henequen plant (or sisal, as its more commonly called) or ‘green gold’. This basically looks like a super-sized Yucca plant (Yucca as in Yucatan* I later realised with a doh) and if you pulp up the fibrous leaves, they can woven into very strong strands which, in turn, can be used for clothing, hammocks, ropes and sacks. It was this last that made the Merida millionaires’ fortune. On its doorstep was the world’s fastest growing economy – the US. Everything it was creating and making had to be sent either across the country or across the world and that needed sacking; coffee, cotton, sugar, corn. The Yucatan wasn’t the only place that grew sisal (named after the port of Sisal, north of Merida, where everything was shipped from), but the Americans decided to pitch a fight against the main rival grower (the Philippines) so Merida ended up with a monopoly.
The sisal was grown on plantations called haciendas which dotted the countryside around the city. There were once 2000 of these. Now, there are just a handful, most reclaimed by the jungle they were carved out of. Like every boom, the sisal bubble burst – conflict in the Yucatan between the Mayans and the Mexican government in the 20s and 30s didn’t help and then, by the 40s and 50s synthetic fibres and plastics took over. Very little sisal is still produced commercially now, and no haciendas cultivate it, although some have been turned into hotels and restaurants serving other millionaires.
*Random bit of etymology. When Hernandes de Cordoba landed here five hundred years before us, he asked the indigenous Mayans what the name of the place was. They replied ‘Yucatan’ which basically translates as ‘I have no idea what you’re asking me’ and so the name stuck.
