Oct 28, 2022 12 min read Digital 52: Global Coworking Stories

Digital 52 5️⃣ - Digital Nomads, Remote Workers, Locals: How do you bring everyone together and create a stronger local impact? This is the story of Centralita Cowork 🇲🇽.

For coworking spaces located in cities steeped in tourism, finding the right balance when building a community is not easy. Length of stay, language and many more parameters make it a bigger, but not impossible, challenge to solve. In this article, you’ll learn how Centralita Cowork, does it.

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Their Tags in the book
Business Growth, COVID-19 Adaptation, Second-Tier Cities
Read their story on page 174

Read the story of Centralita Cowork on page 174 of "Around The World in 250 Coworking Spaces".

We first came across Centralita Cowork, the coworking space you are about to discover, on the internet. We were looking for coworking spaces in Mexico and found ourselves attracted by its name: Centralita.

Initially, we didn’t understand it the way Grecia Pinto, the founder, had intended, as we found out when she later explained it to us. Rather we took it to mean “coworking in the center”. When we clicked on the website to find out more, we really liked what we saw. A space with soft color tones, daylight, greenery, and what seemed to be a nice atmosphere. Before even contacting the team running Centralita Cowork, we started picturing in our heads who the founder(s) could be. We immediately pictured a woman, someone good with visual design, assembling colors but above all, someone who pays attention to the small details.

We wanted to reach out to them to learn more about their coworking story, and to our surprise, our initial assumptions were all correct. Grecia Pinto was exactly what we’d imagined. She definitely reinforced our belief that “coworking spaces are the reflection of their founders.” Looking at Centralita Cowork, it was easy to ‘get’ what she wanted to create.

After our first time chatting, we left our call in awe of her dedication to using her coworking space to bring together two crowds who might not meet very often: travelers and locals. Why wouldn’t they meet? San Cristobal de las Casas is a tourist-heavy city in Chiapas, and since Centralita Cowork is located in the center of it, it would be easy to assume that locals avoid these areas at all costs.

And yet, Grecia made it happen. Slowly but surely, she was able to positively impact San Cristobal de las Casas with her own project: Centralita Cowork.

How has she done it? Let’s make our way to San Cristobal de las Casas to find out!

➡️ A little refresher

Who’s behind the featured space?

Meet Grecia Pinto, a young professional who found a way to get closer to the city she had just moved to when she found coworking.

“I wanted to connect with other creatives but didn’t know where or how to meet them. I used to think ‘I’m sure there are other people like me, working at home on their projects. Maybe even some that share my interests in sustainable fashion and design? It would be so interesting to meet them. But where? They’re all at home or scattered across the 200 cafes in San Cris.’ As there were no coworking spaces, I set out to create one for myself and for other people like me; people who enjoy working in a vibrant environment surrounded by peers, pets, and plants. I built Centralita in order to bring the creatives, slow travelers, and digital nomads together into a communal environment that would allow us to share our projects and creative interests much more naturally than in bars or coffee shops.”