Travel — Noozify Original — February 28, 2026

Discovering Puerto Vallarta: A Beach Destination

By Adam Canissario

During the filming of 1964's The Night of the Iguana, the lead star, Richard Burton, was engaged in a torrid and public affair with Elizabeth Taylor offscreen. The media coverage that followed helped jumpstart Puerto Vallarta's rise to one of Mexico's top destinations in the decades that followed. Now, a bust of Liz Taylor commemorates her contribution to the area's development on Isla Cuale, the little river island just off the southern end of the popular Malecon Boardwalk. Located in the state of Jalisco, this port city has a fascinating history to match its world class beaches and views of clouded mountains and Spanish Colonial architecture.

The film story is stranger than the postcard version. John Huston chose Mismaloya, a cove south of town so remote that the production built a village of 25 houses to lodge the cast and crew for 72 days of shooting in the fall of 1963. Burton, Ava Gardner, Deborah Kerr and Sue Lyon were the credited stars. Taylor was not in the picture at all. She came anyway, and the world's press followed. Burton put her in a house in the hillside neighborhood now called Gringo Gulch, across the street from his own, and had a bridge built between the two, as useful for dodging photographers as for surviving their fights. He gave her the house for her 32nd birthday in 1964, and they married that March. The film opened in August 1964 and won an Oscar for costume design. Huston liked the fishing enough to buy a house eight miles out.

Puerto Vallarta was not new, only unnoticed. Its traditional founding date is December 12, 1851, when Guadalupe Sánchez Torres set up a landing called Las Peñas to move salt inland to the silver mines. The state congress made it a municipality in 1918 and renamed it for Ignacio Vallarta, a former governor of Jalisco who, by every account, never lived there. So the town is named for a man who never visited and famous for a woman not in the movie. It has managed fine.

Roughly one hundred miles west of Guadalajara, Puerto Vallarta sits on the Bahia de Banderas (the Bay of Flags, named, legend says, for the banners the first Spanish soldiers carried). The bay is the final destination for many of the region's ever-evolving rivers. Multiple popular beaches (or "playas" for the Spanish speaking locals) dot the coast of the bay, each with its own vibe and benefits.

The Zona Hotelera is a short bus or cab ride to the bustling downtown area, where you'll find that there's no shortage of resorts and hotels dotting the downtown beach area and its meandering streets. The variety ensures that travelers from every background and budget can find something that suits their tastes and needs. This includes a plethora of options for families, couples, the LGBTQ+ crowd, and action seekers. The bird and marine life are sure to entertain, and you're likely to see some unique species.

Speaking of downtown, it's home to the Malecon Boardwalk. Arguably the life force of the city, this area boasts outdoors markets of locally made arts and crafts. It is also a mile of free sculpture. The bronze Boy on the Seahorse, cast in 1976, has become the city's official tourist symbol, and Alejandro Colunga's Rotunda of the Sea, sixteen surreal bronze creatures installed in 1996, drew protests from local church groups and has been climbed on by children ever since. The region is renowned for its leather sandal and Panama-style hat making industry. These make excellent souvenirs and can be found in nearly every price range. Spending time at the beach is easy in this area — most resorts operate chair and umbrella services that typically offer food and drink service. Think boozy colorful frozen drinks with little umbrellas in them.

Across the Cuale river the streets narrow into the Zona Romántica, the old town and its most walkable quarter. It holds the cafes, the galleries, and the city's gay nightlife, and it ends at Playa de los Muertos, the best-known beach in town. Los Muertos Pier reaches a little over a hundred meters into the bay, a 2013 replacement for an old wooden dock, topped with a steel sail. It is the city's favorite sunset perch and the dock for water taxis to roadless beaches farther south, Yelapa among them.

About twenty miles northwest, at the mouth of the bay, the Marietas Islands are a national park and UNESCO biosphere reserve, home to blue-footed boobies and to the Hidden Beach, a strip of sand inside a collapsed crater reached by swimming through a rock tunnel. The crater is, by most accounts, a souvenir of early-1900s military target practice, which stopped once Jacques Cousteau made a fuss. Access is capped at just over a hundred people a day, so book ahead and expect a life jacket and a helmet. Winter is the reason most people go. Humpback whales arrive from Alaska in December to breed and calve in the bay's warm water and stay through March, once the calves can manage the trip back north. The whales come for the same reason the tourists do, and leave at about the same time.

Being as far south as it is, Puerto Vallarta is, unsurprisingly, quite warm year-round. Though the late fall through early spring bring more moderate highs. Humidity and sudden downpours accompanied by thunder and lightning are not uncommon, especially during the summer's rainy season, which runs roughly June through October. New Year's Eve is perhaps the busiest period, so expect to pay top dollar during that time of year. Lonely Planet's advice is April to June, after the whales and crowds have gone and before the humidity peaks, and it is hard to argue with.

Eat where Jalisco eats. Birria, the state's slow-cooked goat stew in a red chile broth, takes its name from an old Spanish word for something worthless, the conquistadors' verdict on goat meat before local cooks turned it into a weekend institution. Drink raicilla, the coast's own agave spirit, smokier than tequila and made for generations around El Tuito, about 50 km south of town. It earned a denomination of origin in 2019 after centuries as a moonshine whose makers insisted it was not mezcal, mostly to avoid being taxed like one.

So what are you waiting for? Puerto Vallarta is the perfect beach destination, and just a short flight of under three hours from key air hubs in the US, like Dallas Fort-Worth, into Gustavo Díaz Ordaz International Airport, which everyone calls PVR.