Puerto Vallarta

Where it sits. Puerto Vallarta occupies the eastern shore of Bahía de Banderas, the largest bay in Mexico, where the Sierra Madre Occidental drops almost directly into the Pacific on the Jalisco–Nayarit border. The Río Cuale cuts the old town in two, with a wooded island in its mouth linked by footbridges and hung with suspension walkways. North of the river lies the Zona Centro and the cobbled streets climbing toward Gringo Gulch; south lies the Zona Romántica around Playa Los Muertos, the densest concentration of bars, small hotels and beach clubs, and long the heart of one of Latin America's most established gay resort scenes. Beyond the built-up shore the coast turns wild fast: the road south to Mismaloya and Boca de Tomatlán runs on ledges above rocky coves before ending where the jungle takes over.

The story behind it. The settlement began in 1851 as Las Peñas, a landing point serving the silver mines inland at Cuale, and was renamed in 1918 for Ignacio Vallarta, a governor of Jalisco. For a century it was a fishing and farming town of a few thousand people reachable only by boat or light aircraft. That changed in the 1960s and 1970s with a paved highway, an airport and federal tourism investment, and the population has since grown past a quarter of a million. The Parish of Our Lady of Guadalupe, begun in 1903, remains the visual anchor, its tower topped by a crown modelled on the one worn by the Empress Carlota; the original sculpture came down in the 1995 earthquake and was replaced with a lighter fibreglass copy.

On screen. In 1963 John Huston chose the cove at Mismaloya, eleven kilometres south, to film The Night of the Iguana from the Tennessee Williams play, building his set on the southern headland where there was then no road at all — cast and crew were ferried in daily by boat. Richard Burton starred alongside Ava Gardner, Deborah Kerr and Sue Lyon, and the international press descended not for the film but for Burton's affair with Elizabeth Taylor, who was staying nearby. The coverage put an unknown Mexican fishing town on front pages worldwide and effectively invented its tourism industry. Twenty-four years later the same jungle drew another production: much of Predator (1987) was shot at El Edén, a river gorge a few kilometres inland from Mismaloya, where a wrecked helicopter prop still sits by the water.

What the film left behind. Burton bought a house on Calle Zaragoza in the hillside quarter above the church, and later bought the building opposite for Taylor; the pink arched footbridge he had built across the street to connect them is still there and still photographed daily. Casa Kimberly now operates as a small hotel and museum with the couple's rooms preserved. At Mismaloya, the concrete remnants of Huston's set survive on the headland above a beach otherwise given over to palapas and a large resort, and a restaurant at the cove trades on the association. A bronze of Huston sits on the Isla Río Cuale, and the Vallarta Film Festival keeps the connection alive.

What you actually see today. The Malecón, a kilometre-plus seafront promenade rebuilt as a pedestrian boulevard in 2011, is the town's public living room, lined with an unusual open-air sculpture collection: Rafael Zamarripa's Caballito de Mar seahorse of 1976, Sergio Bustamante's ladder-climbing figures, Alejandro Colunga's bizarre bronze chairs. At dusk, voladores from Papantla spin from a pole beside the beach, and the sunset over the bay draws a crowd to the railings. Water defines the rest: snorkelling at Los Arcos, a cluster of granite sea stacks and arches protected as a marine park; water taxis from Boca de Tomatlán to the road-free beaches of Las Ánimas, Quimixto and Yelapa; and humpback whales calving in the bay between December and March.

Getting there and timing. Licenciado Gustavo Díaz Ordaz International Airport sits eight kilometres north of the centre with direct flights from across North America. The dry season from November to April brings warm days, cool evenings and low humidity; June to October is hot, humid and wet, with the highest hurricane risk in September, though the hills are green and prices drop. The Malecón and the newer resort zones are broadly wheelchair-friendly, but the old town's cobblestones, steep lanes and stairways are not. The Zona Romántica works best on foot; buses and taxis are cheap for the coastal road south. Prices split sharply between the all-inclusive strip in the Zona Hotelera north of the marina and the family-run hoteles and taco stands of the old town, where a full meal still costs a fraction of the resort rate. Mismaloya, the film location that started all of it, is a twenty-minute local bus ride from the Zona Romántica.