What Is Puerto Vallarta Known For? The Town Is the Point

At ten at night the malecón smells of grilled corn and diesel and someone is always setting up a speaker. Families walk it end to end, the Huichol patterns in the pavement go by under your feet, the arches at the Aquiles Serdán esplanade are lit from below. Nobody is on their way anywhere. That is the answer to the question in the headline, and the rest of this is detail.

Puerto Vallarta is known for being a town first and a beach second. Most Mexican beach destinations are the other way round.

The malecón, and why the evening starts there

Officially it is Paseo Díaz Ordaz, and it runs 1,300 metres from the Hotel Rosita, the oldest hotel in town, open since 1948, down to the Río Cuale. The sculptures along it are the landmarks people arrange to meet at. Four stone arches brought up from a colonial hacienda in Guadalajara stand at the open-air theatre halfway along, and behind them the crowned tower of the parish church of Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe sits above the roofline, which is the shot everybody takes and nobody regrets.

If you are here for a week you will walk it most nights without planning to.

The Zona Romántica, and whose it is

Cross the Cuale and you are in the old quarter: everything south of the river and west of Insurgentes, down to the water. Basilio Badillo is the restaurant street. Olas Altas runs parallel to Playa Los Muertos, which is the town beach in the real sense — people from Vallarta are on it, not only visitors.

This is also where the town's gay life lives, and has for decades. The Puerto Vallarta Tourism Board's own line is that this is the only destination in Latin America with its own gay district — a handful of blocks where the bars, hotels and beach clubs are gay-owned and nobody is making a point of it. Vallarta Pride is in May; the parade comes down the main avenue and the malecón and finishes on Olas Altas, and the street party is on Lázaro Cárdenas. Some of the groups we place here come for exactly that week; others are in town in February and never know it exists.

The villages you can only reach by boat

South of town the road runs out. Past Mismaloya it reaches Boca de Tomatlán and stops, and from the little concrete pier there the pangas go out to places that have never had a road: Las Ánimas, Playa Caballo, Quimixto, Yelapa. Yelapa, Las Ánimas, Colomitos and Majahuitas are each a different kind of afternoon, and we have written about all four.

Quimixto is the one to take a first-timer to. About twenty minutes down from Boca, amber sand rather than white, and a waterfall an hour's walk up the La Puerta river — or you ride a horse up, which is what the children always choose. Yelapa is further, at the southern end of the bay about 27 km from town, bigger, and with its own waterfall and its own opinion of itself.

If your group wants one evening on the water and cannot decide, we book the bioluminescence run out to Los Arcos more than anything else on this coast. Sunset first, then the water lights up around the boat.

What you eat

The reason we send first-timers to Vallarta rather than anywhere else is the food, and the depth of it. Street level: the fish taco stands on Olas Altas and the places on the Cuale island. Middle: the seafood places where the catch is on ice at the door and you point. Top: a long dinner on Basilio Badillo, and Trio, which has been Bernhard's for years and is still the table people ask for.

In the house, the chef is the other half of it. At Casa Karma, up in Conchas Chinas, eight bedrooms over the water, the listing names its own chef — Javier — and says the menus are built around the group rather than a card. That is the normal arrangement on this coast, not the exception, and it is worth understanding before you compare a Vallarta house with one anywhere else.

If anybody in the group thinks tequila is a shot with salt, send them on a tasting on the first afternoon. It changes the rest of the week.

Whales, mid-December to the end of March

Humpbacks come down from Alaska into Banderas Bay to breed and to calve, and they are here from the middle of December to the end of March. The bay is deep and wide and they come well inside it, which means that in a good week you do not need a boat — you need a terrace, a coffee and twenty minutes of looking in the same direction.

Outside those months, nobody mentions whales and nothing is missing.

Behind the town, and north of it

Vallarta is pressed between the water and the mountains, which is why the streets climb the way they do. Fifteen minutes inland the Sierra Madre starts, and with it the river walks, the swimming holes and the small towns that have nothing to do with the coast at all.

North, over the state line into Nayarit, is Sayulita — about 38 km north of the airport, under an hour, a Pueblo Mágico with a surf break, a market and more dogs than cars. North, not south. Plenty of guides have that backwards.

One line of history, because it explains the rest

John Huston decided to shoot The Night of the Iguana not in Hollywood but in Mismaloya, a village of about three hundred people down the coast, and brought Richard Burton, Ava Gardner and Deborah Kerr with him for a film out of a Tennessee Williams play. Vallarta has not been quiet since. Huston's sculpture stands on the island in the Río Cuale, and the Hotel Rosita at the top of the malecón, where Burton and Elizabeth Taylor stayed during the filming, is still open — the tourism board tells that story itself.

Where to stay, and what to do first

Everything above is within half an hour of a house. The town is walkable, how you get around is a solved problem, and the houses here come staffed more often than on any other Mexican coast.

Start with our fully staffed houses in Puerto Vallarta and tell Rocío which week.