Educational and Fun Private City Tour, Puerto Vallarta

Overview

A private half-day tour with a personal driver-guide, visiting a historic cemetery, the hillside Gringo Gulch neighborhood, the Cuale River, and the central market.

With a personal driver-guide, this private tour reaches real corners of Puerto Vallarta beyond the standard route — a historic cemetery, the hillside Gringo Gulch neighborhood (long associated with the city's American and Canadian expatriate community, including Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor), and the Cuale River, plus food tastings at the central market and views from the Zona Romántica.

Highlights

• Gringo Gulch A hillside neighborhood tied to Puerto Vallarta's mid-20th-century expatriate history.
• Central market tastings Complimentary food tastings included at the city's main market.
• Cuale River The river dividing downtown from the Zona Romántica.

What Stops Does This Tour Make?

A popular starting point — every Voyzo itinerary is fully customizable, so we'll shape the order and stops around your group.

Important Information

Frequently Asked Questions

About This Tour

A private half-day tour with a personal driver-guide, visiting a historic cemetery, the hillside Gringo Gulch neighborhood, the Cuale River, and the central market. With a personal driver-guide, this private tour reaches real corners of Puerto Vallarta beyond the standard route — a historic cemetery, the hillside Gringo Gulch neighborhood (long associated with the city's American and Canadian expatriate community, including Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor), and the Cuale River, plus food tastings at the central market and views from the Zona Romántica.

Gringo Gulch is the real subject of this tour's name, and its history is more specific — and more unusual — than the nickname suggests. The hillside neighborhood overlooking downtown and the bay grew into an expatriate enclave well before it became internationally famous, drawing American and Canadian writers and artists, some accounts suggest partly fleeing the political climate of the McCarthy era in the United States. That quiet reputation changed completely in late 1963, when Richard Burton arrived to film John Huston's 'The Night of the Iguana' and took up residence in a casita in the neighborhood. He soon invited Elizabeth Taylor, his co-star from 'Cleopatra' and the center of a very public off-screen romance, to join him — and rented the house directly across the street for her, a property that came to be known as Casa Kimberly.

What happened next is well documented and genuinely part of the neighborhood's physical fabric today: Burton eventually purchased Casa Kimberly outright and gave it to Taylor as a birthday gift, and had a private footbridge — still known locally as the Lover's Bridge — built connecting the two houses so the couple, famous for fighting as fiercely as they adored each other, could move between their respective homes without stepping onto the street. Casa Kimberly operates today as a boutique hotel, and the bridge remains one of Gringo Gulch's most photographed landmarks — a small, strange piece of Hollywood's Golden Age still standing in a Mexican hillside neighborhood decades later.

The rest of this private tour rounds out the picture with real, less glamorous corners of the city: a historic cemetery, the Cuale River as it winds past downtown, and the central market, where complimentary tastings give a genuine sense of everyday Puerto Vallarta rather than its tourist-facing version. Together with Gringo Gulch's film-star history, it's a route built around the city's actual layered story — colonial-era roots, mid-century expatriate culture, and a decades-long Hollywood romance — rather than a single highlight reel.