Miami-based couple Carlos Adyan and Carlos Quintanilla lead busy professional lives: Adyan is the host of the NBCUniversal Telemundo show En Casa Con Telemundo and co-proprietor of restaurant A Fuego Lento, while Quintanilla is the vice president of original content for Sony Pictures Television. Given the couple’s high-profile jobs (and their combined Instagram following of nearly 700,000), when it came time to plan their wedding, the couple felt like they needed to step away from their home city to get into a nuptial mindset. “We thought a destination wedding would take us out of our setting—we’ll feel like we’re on vacation, not like we have to go to work tomorrow after the wedding,” says Adyan.
And so they married last month in the charming colonial city of San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. Though Quintanilla is Mexican, and both men speak Spanish, it was no easy feat to plan a 400-person wedding—sure to be splashed all over social media—1,300 miles away from home. Here, the newlyweds share how they went about plotting a rollicking May celebration with 400 of their closest friends and family in attendance.
Mull locations across Latin America
With their hearts set on a destination celebration, the couple started by considering—and visiting—the places they were born; as noted, Quintanilla is Mexican while Adyan is Puerto Rican. “We traveled to a lot of places, which was really fun,” says Adyan. “We started in Puerto Rico, and I love Puerto Rico, but it’s not normal there to have a wedding of 400 people, and that was our number from the beginning.”
Mexico City wasn’t quite right, either, as it wouldn’t lend that magical transportive quality they hoped to impart. The couple flew to Guatemala to check out some spots, but “the curfew there is [typically] 11 p.m., and we wanted to party a little bit later than that,” laughs Adyan.
Let the destination lead the way
The city of San Miguel de Allende, long loved by artists and tourists alike, wasn’t even on their radar until friends who lived there suggested they come visit and consider the place for their wedding. “My friends said, ‘Hey, why haven’t you tried San Miguel de Allende?’ Honestly I’d seen photos and never visited!” says Adyan. With an invitation to stay at their friends’ ranch, the couple spent two weeks over Christmas 2023 visiting the area, trying restaurants, and “discovering every single spot.”
They fell in love with both San Miguel and the ranch, which is located within the city’s community of Las Fincas. “When we came here, energy doesn’t lie. It was just the place,” he continues. “It’s phenomenal, the energy you feel there.” In the end, their generous friends had everything they’d wanted: The couple decided to marry on the ranch itself.
Learn that two planners (in two countries) are better than one
It was a good thing that Quintanilla and Adyan flipped for the property, because it would take a lot of work to get it ready for their celebration. “The venue was not prepared for weddings. We had to bring in everything: the stage, the floor, the tent, everything,” says Adyan. In addition to a whole team of rental companies and vendors working throughout the week of their celebration, the couple wound up hiring two wedding planners: one in San Miguel and one in Puerto Rico.
