Locksmith in Puerto Morelos

Arrival time: 40 to 55 minutes from Cancun.

Puerto Morelos is thirty-six kilometres south of Cancun, a fishing village that became a small town without ever quite becoming a resort. It is split in two by the highway: the beach village on the sea side, and the colonia on the inland side where most people actually live.

Which half you are in changes the job. The beach side is vacation rentals, small hotels, restaurants and second homes owned by people who are not in the country most of the year — so lockouts, lock changes between guests, and properties opened after months closed up. The colonia is ordinary residential work: worn cylinders, lost keys, doors that no longer line up.

It is outside the municipality of Benito Juárez, so there is a distance charge. It is quoted on the phone as part of one figure before anyone leaves, and it does not change on arrival. Forty to fifty-five minutes from Cancun depending on the highway, which is straightforward except when it is not — the Cancun-Playa road backs up badly around holiday weekends.

The village is close enough to the reef that everything metal corrodes fast, and here it is compounded by how many properties stand empty. A lock that is never used and never lubricated in salt air seizes within a season. The most common non-emergency call from the beach side is exactly that: an owner arrives for the winter, the key goes in, and nothing turns.

If you look after a property here, the cheap prevention is worth more than anything we can sell you: work every lock and lubricate it every few weeks, or have whoever checks the house do it. It takes two minutes per door and prevents most of what we get called out for.

For guests, the useful landmarks are the square, the lighthouse and the highway crossing. Street addresses in the village exist but nobody uses them, and the colonia is laid out in numbered streets that are easy to mistake for each other.