Embrace the romance of Mexico
When Elizabeth Taylor made the thenscandalous decision to move to Mexico to be with her married beau Richard Burton in the early 1960s, Puerto Vallarta was a sleepy fishing village.
The late actors’ infamous love-hate relationship began on the set of Cleopatra and, while co-starring in the 1964 movie Night Of The Iguana, they also fell for Puerto Vallarta. They bought two houses across the street from one another so they could live near, rather than actually with, each other.
Over the next decade or so, Taylor and Burton married and divorced twice as Puerto Vallarta, covered in their stardust, transformed into a holiday hot spot.
When I visited in 2016, millions travelled to the city each year to swim in the sandy beach-lined Bahı´a de Banderas, wander the cobblestone streets of the Zona Roma´ ntica, hike the palm-covered Sierra Madre mountains, and drown themselves in coronas and margaritas in the bars that line seaside promenade El Malecon.
Eager to experience the Mexico that Taylor and Burton fell in love with, I treated Puerto Vallarta as a base, joining a day trip to Las Caletas, a tropical island idyll once home to Hollywood director John Huston, and catching buses to far-flung beaches to take long treks along the coast.
The day at Las Caletas, which can only be accessed by boat, was a standout. I refilled bowls of ceviche and guacamole until I could stomach no more, admired macaws in the thick jungle nature reserve and swam with a turtle.
I spent my last couple of days in the remote coastal village of Yelapa on Puerto Vallarta’s southernmost cove. I escaped the daytrippers on a hike to the furthest of two cascading waterfalls. It was a bit of an adventure, requiring several river crossings and some rock scrambling, but my reward was a waterfall pool in what felt like my own tropical Garden of Eden.
You can read about another authentic part of Mexico in Nick Davies’ account of a tequila tour in the town that gave the drink its name on pages 32-33.