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.
