I first traveled to the Mexican resort town of Puerto Vallarta because of a decades-old, black-and-white movie. On a frigid winter night, as I was flipping channels in my Manhattan apartment, I stumbled across a showing of “The Night of the Iguana” on Turner Classic Movies.
This 1964 adaptation of the Tennessee Williams play, directed by John Huston and starring Richard Burton and Ava Gardner, was not exactly a film classic. The story was overheated; the acting even more so. But as it played out on my TV screen, I began paying less attention to the plot and more to the lush landscape on which it played out.
The coastal town, set in the Mexican state of Jalisco, and cradled by the gorgeous Bahía de Banderas to the west and the sweeping Sierra Madre mountain range to the east, was briefly a tourist hot spot in the 1960s and early ’70s, helped in part by the Hollywood crowd that flocked there after Huston, et al., came back and raved about it to their friends. Later, an international airport made it more accessible, and tourism boomed.
ImageOver the years, though, Puerto Vallarta was eclipsed by Cancún,66jogo Cabo San Lucas, Tulum and even Sayulita, a surfing destination just a few miles up the Pacific Coast. Though undeniably beautiful, with access to fantastic beaches, those places felt to me blandly familiar — sprawling resorts that, for the most part, seemed to be offering a cocoon-like escape from the actual country of Mexico. I wanted something a little less predictable and, for lack of a better term, a little more “authentic.”
Plus, I was intrigued by the role that Puerto Vallarta played in what has often been called the romance of the 20th century — the scandalous affair between Burton and Elizabeth Taylor. The two stars, who met on the set of “Cleopatra,” turned Puerto Vallarta into their romantic hideaway in the early days of their clandestine relationship, when both were still married to other people.
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