Puerto Vallarta is by far the best-known resort on Mexico's upper Pacific Coast. The late film director and sometime resident John Huston put the town on the map when he filmed Tennessee Williams's play The Night of the Iguana on the outskirts of the village in 1963. Elizabeth Taylor came to keep Richard Burton company during the filming, and the gossip about their romance - both were married at the time, but not to each other - brought this quaint Mexican fishing village, with its cobblestone lanes and whitewashed, tile-roof houses, to the public's attention. Before long, travel agents were deluged with queries about Puerto Vallarta.
The fabled cobblestone streets are clogged with bumper-to-bumper traffic during the holiday season, but, despite the city's resort status, parts of Puerto Vallarta are still picturesque. For a sense of the Eden that once was, travel south of town to the lush green mountains where the Río Tomatlán tumbles over boulders into the sea, or north to Punta Mita on the northern tip of Bahía de Banderas (Bay of Flags), where the exclusive Four Seasons resort lies.

The Bahía de Banderas attracted pirates and explorers as early as the 1500s; it was used as a stopover on long sailings as a place for the crew to relax (or maybe plunder and pillage). Sir Francis Drake apparently stopped here. In the mid-1850s, Don Guadalupe Sánchez Carrillo developed the bay as a port for the silver mines by the Río Cuale. Then it was known as Puerto de Peñas and had about 1,500 inhabitants. It remained a village until 1918, when it was made a municipality by the state of Jalisco and named after Ignacio L. Vallarta, a governor of Jalisco.

In the 1950s Puerto Vallarta was essentially a pretty hideaway for those in the know - the wealthy and some hardy escapists. PV - as the former fishing village is called these days - is now a city with more than 300,000 residents. Airports, hotels, and highways have supplanted palm groves and fishing shacks. About 1.5 million people visit each year, most of them between November through April. There are now more than 9,000 hotel rooms in Puerto Vallarta.

Despite the transformation, every attempt has been made to keep the town's character and image intact. Even the parking lot at the local Gigante supermarket is cobblestone, and by law any house built in town must be painted white. When you visit, you'll still see houses with red-tile roofs on palm-covered hills overlooking glistening blue water. Pack mules clop down the steep cobblestone streets. Within 16 km (10 mi) of town are peaceful coves, rushing rivers, and steep mountain roads that curve and twist through jungles of pines and palms.