The Place We're at Now: Puerto Vallarta, Mexico
We're back where we lived during many Covid months — and watching whales from our balcony. Bonus: lots of PV travel tips!
This is a regular feature about where we currently are in the world: how we ended up there, what it costs, and exactly what we think.
Buenos dias from Puerto Vallarta, Mexico! Brent and I arrived here on New Year’s Eve for a three-month stay.
The Mexican locals call the city “Vallarta,” but gringos like Brent and me tend to call it “PV.” It’s located on Mexico’s Pacific coast, nestled inside Banderas Bay in the state of Jalisco.
PV was a sleepy fishing village until the early 1960s when Richard Burton came to film The Night of the Iguana, a movie adaptation of Tennessee Williams’ play, directed by John Huston. Burton brought his girlfriend, Elizabeth Taylor.
Burton and Taylor were then two of the most famous people in the world, but they were also both married to other people — which meant they ended up being accompanied by about 60 zillion paparazzi who wanted pictures of the “scandal.” These photographers also ended up taking pictures of the surrounding area. All the gossip was great for Richard Burton’s and Elizabeth Taylor’s careers — and for Puerto Vallarta, which became world-famous.
To this day, you can still see the ruins of the sets from The Night of the Iguana in Mismaloya, about twelve kilometers south of Puerto Vallarta. This beautiful cove is also where the cheeky Apple TV show Acapulco is filmed. The pink resort is the centerpiece of the bay, not far from where scenes from the movie Predator were filmed in the jungle above town.
Huston, Burton, and Taylor all bought villas in the PV area and visited often, and in the Gringo Gulch part of Puerto Vallarta, you can still see the bridge Burton and Taylor built between their two villas — deemed the Kissing Bridge since it was supposedly built so they could visit each other in the middle of the night. The complex is now a museum and hotel.
Since the 1960s, PV has grown from a mere 12,000 people to more than 300,000 and has become one of Mexico’s most popular tourist destinations; it attracted over six million visitors in 2024, a record.
One big draw is the famously mild weather, which averages between 70°F and 85°F (21°C–29°C) — though, in fairness, it gets quite hot and steamy in the summer “low season” months.
The bulk of the city’s population is “mestizo,” or Mexicans of mixed Indigenous and European ancestry. But it’s also home to one of the largest expat communities in Mexico: about ten to fifteen thousand year-round expats, with another forty or fifty thousand folks — mostly snowbirding Americans and Canadians — who spend the winter “high season” months here.
PV has two prominent geographical features: the stunning Banderas Bay to the west and the Sierra Madre Mountains to the east. In places, there’s almost no space between them, and the jungle-covered mountains often rise up directly from the ocean, making for a dramatic coastline — and some incredible views.
The sandy beaches are also plentiful and deservedly famous.
PV is an open, tolerant place known for its large LGBTQ community — although, let’s be honest, it’s mostly gay men.
Not coincidentally, it’s also a very hip and artsy city with a thriving music, theater, and fine arts scene.
How did we end up here?
Brent and I holed up in PV for seven months during the first year of Covid. We loved it, but mostly spent our time doing outdoor activities, and we always felt like we didn’t get to know the actual city as well as we wanted.
Also, we were back in the U.S. for the holidays, and we have plans to be back there again in April, so we didn’t want to go too far afield for only three months. We’re also trying to reduce our carbon emissions.
The final reason we came is, well, we spent much of last year in Europe and the UK where it was pretty rainy and dreary, even in the summer. Frankly, we wanted to go somewhere where we’d be guaranteed sunshine and warm weather.
Where are we staying? What does it cost?
We booked the same villa we stayed in during Covid, but it wasn’t available for our first nine days. So we booked a very highly rated place in central PV — a 9.6 out of ten. The listing had the headline “Amazing View in the Heart of Puerto Vallarta.”
Well, it was in the heart of Puerto Vallarta, and it did have an amazing view.
Unfortunately, the rest of the apartment was a piece of crap.
We had noted that the listing didn’t yet have enough reviews to generate an average and that the existing rating was based on “reviews from other platforms,” but we still thought we’d be okay. Now we suspect those “reviews from other platforms” were for the incredible unit next to ours, which is managed by the same person.
It also wasn’t cheap:
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