One of Mexico's most popular vacation spots, Puerto Vallarta is on the edge of the Sierra Madre range and has been attracting outsiders since the 16th century. Its Bahía de Banderas drew pirates and explorers as early as the 1500s; it was used as a stopover on long trips as a place for the crew to relax (or maybe plunder and pillage). Sir Francis Drake apparently stopped here. In the mid-1850s, Don Guadalupe Sánchez Carrillo developed the bay as a port for the silver mines by the Río Cuale. Then it was known as Puerto de Peñas (Rocky Port) and had about 1,500 inhabitants. In 1918 it was made a municipality and renamed for Ignacio L. Vallarta, a governor of Jalisco.
In the 1950s Puerto Vallarta was essentially a pretty hideaway for those in the know -- the wealthy and some hardy escapists. When it first entered the general public's consciousness, with John Huston's 1964 movie The Night of the Iguana, it was a quiet fishing and farming community. After the movie was released, tourism boomed, and today PV (as it's now called) is a city with some 250,000 residents. Airports, hotels, and highways have supplanted palm groves and fishing shacks. About 3 million people visit each year, and from November through April cobblestone streets are clogged with pedestrians and cars. There are now nearly 18,000 hotel rooms in Puerto Vallarta, with another 4,000 in Nuevo Vallarta, on the bay's northern edge in Nayarit State.
Hurricane Kenna, a Category 5 storm, hit the Pacific coast on October 25, 2002. Small homes and businesses from north of Manzanillo to around San Blas, Nayarit, were devastated; simple structures of palm were blown away by winds or washed away by huge tidal surges. The hotel zone in PV, as well as the malecón and nearby streets, were devastated by five-story waves. Shopkeepers, restaurant owners, and hoteliers were quick to put the town back together. Though most places were repaired within weeks, it took months to restore several businesses, including the Sheraton hotel.
A more profound and lasting effect on the landscape is the result of the city's vast popularity and resulting growth. But while PV has spread north and south over the years, every attempt has been made to keep intact the character and image of downtown. City ordinances require houses there to be painted white with red-tile roofs, limit the number of floors, and dictate other architectural details. Pack mules still occasionally clop down the streets and, in the background, velvety green hills look so close they seem to spring from the sea. Steep mountain roads curve and twist through jungles of pines and palms, and rivers rush down to meet fine sand beaches and rocky coves.
