According to Puerto Vallarta's slim volume of recorded history, this highly developed bilingual resort that now attracts over 2.5 million visitors every year (over half of them from within Mexico) began its urban life as late as 1851, when a family by the name of Sánchez plonked themselves down near the mouth of the Río Cuale.  Prior to being domesticated, the area was part of the traditional lands of the indigenous folk that peopled the coast for many centuries, and probably wasn't encountered by non-natives until the 16th century, when passing Spanish armadas stocked up on local water and firewood.  The Spanish were quite taken with the sheltered harbour and several times considered establishing a colony there, but never acted on the idea.

Emboldened by the Sánchez land-grab, groups of farmers and fisherfolk followed suit, and within 35 years there were enough people living in the area to seriously entertain the idea of giving the settlement a name.  The town's first official incarnation was as Las Peñas, but in 1918 'Puerto Vallarta' was cobbled together from puertoi (port) and the name of a former state governor, Ignacio Luis Vallarta.

In 1954, Mexico's main domestic airline began to realise the tourist potential of what was a beautiful village in a pristine bayside location, and inaugurated flights to a dusty runway in what's now the centre of Puerto Vallarta, an area originally named after the peasant revolutionary Emiliano Zapata.  But the real turning point in the development of the local tourist industry came almost a decade later, when a film director by the name of John Huston decided to shoot his adaptation of Tennessee Williams' Night Of The Iguana in the nearby cove of Mismaloya.  At that stage, in 1963, Puerto Vallarta numbered 2000 people.

The international press quickly dropped their (at best marginal) interest in the creative efforts of gifted director Huston and a crew that included famous Mexican cinematographer Gabriel Figueroa, and descended on Puerto Vallarta to signpost the romance between lead actor Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor with more salacious headlines than you could poke a euphemism at.  While they were at it, they also wrote smouldering prose about co-star Ava Gardner, all of which ensured that Puerto Vallarta became the latest stereotype of tropical romance.  Once the film crew had left, the tour groups loaded with starry-eyed honeymooners started to arrive.

Puerto Vallarta never looked back.  It used the influx of visitors and investors generated by all the overblown publicity to lobby successfully to become a designated Mexican 'city' in 1968, and then began building highway links south along the coast to Barra de Navidad and north to Compostela, with a new international airport thrown in for good measure.  In the decade from 1980, the population of central Puerto Vallarta doubled to well over 100,000.

Puerto Vallarta has since gone on to become one of Mexico's premier international beach resorts, commanding as much tourist-brochure space as other eminent Pacific playgrounds like Acapulco, Mazatlán and Zihuatanejo-Ixtapa.  This premier resort-city receives 2.5 million visitors annually, 1.5 million of whom are Mexican.