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The story goes that in the early ’60s, the actor Richard Burton found himself in Switzerland in the midst of a romance with Elizabeth Taylor when he got a call from John Huston. The director invited him to star in his upcoming film,
The Night of the Iguana, which was to be filmed “in paradise!”
That’s how the renowned director described Puerto Vallarta and its surroundings, which were little known outside Mexico at the time. He understood so little about this area of the Pacific Coast that the actor went to the Mexican embassy in Switzerland and asked to see a map; he wanted them to point to “that paradise” that would serve as the setting for the film adaptation of one of playwright Tennessee Williams’s masterpieces.