Where Do Celebrities Stay in Puerto Vallarta? Behind a Gate

In 1963 a man who did not want to be photographed built a bridge over a street. It is still there, arching across a lane in Gringo Gulch, and a good part of Puerto Vallarta's reputation rests on it.

That is the honest answer to the question in the headline. Famous people have been coming here for sixty years, and what they came for has not changed: a wall, a gate, a staff who do not talk, and a town that does not stare.

The film that did it

John Huston decided to shoot The Night of the Iguana not in Hollywood but in Mismaloya, a jungle village of about three hundred people down the coast that you could only reach by boat. He brought Richard Burton, Ava Gardner and Deborah Kerr with him, for a film out of a Tennessee Williams play. The Puerto Vallarta tourism board tells that story itself, and records that Burton and Elizabeth Taylor stayed at the Hotel Rosita at the top of the malecón while it was being made. Huston's sculpture stands on the island in the Río Cuale.

Taylor had come to be with Burton. El Universal puts it plainly: the two of them moved into the house called Casa Kimberly, fleeing the paparazzi and the fame, a year after meeting on the set of Cleopatra.

El Informador has the rest. The house was built in 1957. Burton rented it, then bought it and gave it to Taylor for her thirty-second birthday. To avoid the photographers waiting in the street, the house was joined to the one opposite by a bridge, painted pink. She sold it in 1990 to Toy Holstein and her daughter, who turned it into a museum. It is a hotel now, with its own restaurant, and you can stand underneath the bridge for nothing.

The four neighbourhoods, and what each one is

Gringo Gulch is the hill above the Río Cuale, north of the old quarter. El Universal describes it as a residential area that kept its traditional architecture: red tile roofs, adobe fronts. The houses are small by the standards of the hillside estates and they have the history.

Conchas Chinas is the headland immediately south of town, where the road climbs and the houses are cut into the rock above their own coves.

Sierra del Mar is further south again, behind its own gate, in the trees above two small bays. Everything inside it is residential and there is no street to walk down, which is the attraction.

Amapas and the South Shore sit between the two, close enough to the Zona Romántica to walk down to dinner and high enough to be out of it afterwards.

What the word privacy means in a house

Not a security system. Three ordinary things.

A gate you control and a wall you cannot see over, so the arriving car is the last anybody sees of you. A house that turns inward — a courtyard, a terrace facing its own pool — rather than one that faces a street. And a staff who are there every day, which is the part nobody puts in the brochure: a house with a chef in it is a house where the group never has to be looked at over dinner unless it wants to be.

Two hundred and fifteen of our listings use the word gated and two hundred use the word privacy. In Puerto Vallarta, thirteen houses use both. These are four of them, described in their own words.

Four houses that do this for a living

Hacienda de Los Santos, up in Real de Conchas Chinas, is eight bedrooms for sixteen. Its listing describes hacienda-style architecture with stone columns and vaulted ceilings, Spanish Alhambra tiles, an inner courtyard, and a gated community with twenty-four-hour security. The staff are there from nine to seven every day — houseman, chef, waiter and bartender, maids — and the chef does up to three meals.

Casa Peregrina is ten bedrooms for twenty inside the Sierra del Mar gates: eleven thousand square feet of interior, a heated saltwater pool, a palapa with its own bar, and the line that matters — located within a secure, 24/7 gated community. A houseman, a bartender, housekeeping, and a chef for three meals a day.

Villa Estrella Mar in Amapas is the one that reads like a compound: twenty-two thousand square feet of Spanish colonial architecture over several levels, three hundred and eighty feet of secluded beachfront, a gated compound with overnight security, and a full-time staff of thirteen including two in-house chefs and night guards.

Casa Morada on the South Shore is eleven bedrooms for twenty-two, directly on the beach, with a chef for three meals a day, a houseman and a night watchman. And Casa Karma in Conchas Chinas has what might be the most eloquent photograph in our library: a white wall, a gate and a house number, and nothing else to see from the street.

What we will not tell you

No listing in our collection names a guest. We do not confirm who has stayed where, we do not hint, and we have never put a name on a house page. That is not coyness — it is the thing being sold. A house that advertises its last famous guest is a house that will advertise you.

So the honest version of this story is not a list of names. It is that Vallarta learned sixty years ago how to leave people alone, and that the houses built on these headlands since were built by people who wanted the same thing.

Where to start

If you want the history, stay in town and walk up to the bridge; a long dinner in town is twenty minutes away and Café des Artistes has been doing it for twenty-five years under Thierry Blouet. If you want the gate, go up the hill to Conchas Chinas or out to Sierra del Mar, and how you get around stops being a question because a car comes to the door.

Start with our fully staffed houses in Puerto Vallarta and tell Rocío how far up the hill you want to be.