Soon after sunrise, they begin streaming across the border, most on foot. Some of the hundreds in the crowd pull rolling suitcases and wear backpacks, others carry little more than a purse or shopping bag as they enter Los Algodones, a Mexican town just outside Yuma, Arizona. Awaiting them are scores of jaladores, or barkers, hawking the services that many have traveled hundreds or even thousands of miles to seek: “Hey buddy, optometría, farmacia, dental?”

Billboards lining the highway into the 1-square-mile outpost, tucked into the corner where Arizona, California and Mexico’s Baja California state meet, proclaim it the “Dental Capital of the World.” Also known as Molar City, the town of about 5,000 boasts some 350 dental offices. Over the past two decades, it’s emerged as a go-to destination for people seeking relief from high out-of-pocket costs and long waits for dental care in the US and Canada. A filling costs just $50, a root canal sets you back roughly $250, and a crown goes for about $500—though most visitors are here for more intensive services.

George Kyle, a truck driver from Saskatchewan, says he comes to Los Algodones every few years for dental work. On his first visit, he got a couple of cavities filled. Since then he’s had most of his teeth pulled and replaced with implants. The trip from Canada to the Mexican border costs him less than $200 in diesel, easily offset by the low prices in Mexico. In Canada the care “would have been probably close to $9,000,” he says. “Here it cost me $4,600 Canadian.”

The Mexican government claims Mexico is second only to Thailand in terms of revenue from medical tourism—and first when it comes to dental work. As many as 3 million visitors a year flock to the country seeking lower health-care costs than they can find at home. (I visited Molar City in November 2022 and May 2023 with my mom, who needed extensive dental work.)

Some 69 million US residents—about 20% of the population—lacked dental insurance in 2020, according to the National Association of Dental Plans, and even those with coverage typically must pay out of pocket for surgical procedures such as implants. Many older Americans lack dental benefits because they aren’t covered by Medicare (though the expansion of Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act and the growing popularity of Medicare Advantage plans have helped). And Canada’s national health-care system doesn’t include dental coverage.

Some visitors to Los Algodones arrive with an appointment at a clinic, many of which charter buses to collect patients at the Yuma airport, 14 miles away, and deliver them to the border. But most offices also take walk-ins, which is why the main drag—Calle 2—is filled with jaladores and signs advertising implants and other services.

The first dental clinic to greet visitors crossing the border is run by Dr. Bernardo Magaña, a central figure in the Molar City origin story. The nonagenarian opened the town’s first dental practice in 1968 and later added a dentistry school. In the 1980s, Magaña became a municipal delegate and set out to clean up the town’s image by shutting down its brothels. Success came at a price: Magaña told Dentistry Today that he was abducted by bandits in 1990 and that his wife drained the family’s savings to ransom him.

The transformation of Los Algodones from dusty border pueblito to dental hub was made possible by two developments over the past 20 years, says Josef Woodman, chief executive officer of Patients Beyond Borders, a medical tourism consultant in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. One was rising standards for health care and services in middle-income countries such as Mexico and Thailand. The second was the internet, which expanded the reach of providers of medical tourism beyond cosmetic surgeons who relied on well-heeled clients for word-of-mouth advertising. “It wouldn’t surprise me if in 10 years it becomes a major medical center,” Woodman says of Los Algodones.

The sheer number of clinics in Los Algodones means that a visitor shopping for price alone can find a deal that’s too good to be true, Woodman says. But it’s hard to beat Mexican dentistry for care and convenience, as even small practices in Los Algodones offer all-inclusive services such as CT scans or panoramic X-rays, and they’re outfitted to produce crowns and implants on premises. “In the US you just won’t see a dentist with an in-house lab,” he says.

Molar City’s bargain prices for dental care lure patients who might otherwise be wary of venturing south of the border. Yet an incident in March, when four people from South Carolina were kidnapped—and two killed—while visiting the Gulf Coast city of Matamoros for cosmetic procedures, was a reminder that the brutal vendettas of the country’s drug cartels sometimes claim innocent bystanders.

Although the murders occurred more than 1,300 miles away, the issue is top of mind in Los Algodones. A somewhat dated tourism website for the town boasts that Molar City is “safer than Disneyland, but without the measles.”

Ana Villanueva, who works as a housecleaner in Cottonwood, Arizona, about an hour north of Phoenix, says her son-in-law was wary when her daughter started planning a trip to Los Algodones for tooth extractions and implants. “I told him, nobody here is a hooligan or the Mafia or anything like that,” she says. And while she cautions against visiting one particular dental practice on the strip, where she claims she saw a patient injected with a horse tranquilizer, Villanueva insists, “Everybody is very nice.” And the prices are even nicer: Her daughter’s care would have cost $60,000 in Arizona, she says. In Mexico the bill was less than $20,000.

One reason Americans and Canadians feel safe getting their teeth fixed in Mexico is that dental procedures are pretty uniform around the world. Francisco Lopez, who’s worked as a surgical dental assistant in Los Algodones for nine years, points out that not only have many of the doctors practicing in Molar City trained in the US, they’re also using the same tools of the trade. “Different kinds of materials for crowns,” he says, “metal, porcelain, zirconium—they’re worldwide.”

Beyond their swish-and-spit duties, many Los Algodones dental assistants wind up serving as unofficial concierges for patients and family members, helping them navigate problems with cellphone SIM cards or currency exchange. Lopez recently transitioned to an administrative role at Happy Mouth Dental, serving as a liaison for international patients. That includes serving them lunch at the taco joint the clinic operates next door. In a display of enterprising synergy between the businesses, Lopez says he’s happy to pitch birria tacos to patients at the practice—and dental care to anyone who simply stops in for a snack.