Isla del Río Cuale

Isla del Río Cuale, usually just Isla Cuale, is a narrow island in the Cuale River where it reaches the sea in the middle of Puerto Vallarta, with El Centro on the north bank and the Zona Romántica on the south. It is car-free: footbridges reach it from both banks, including the Puente Río Cuale on the Malecón at its seaward tip, so most people cross it on the way from one neighbourhood to the other. The island itself is a product of the river. A cyclone in 1925 shifted the Cuale's course and split its flow in two, and the land between the channels slowly built up; the city marked the island's centenary with a plaque and a cultural festival in October 2025. It was once known as Isla de Santa Clara and Isla de los Niños, and was laid out as a public park in the 1970s.

The seaward end is the busiest part, lined with stalls selling crafts, clothes, jewellery and Wixárika (Huichol) beadwork brought down from the mountain villages of the Sierra Madre. Upstream the island turns into a quiet strip of shady paths under tall trees, with riverside restaurants, galleries and plenty of iguanas. A bronze statue of the director John Huston, installed in 1988, remembers the director who filmed The Night of the Iguana at nearby Mismaloya in 1963, and the sculpture Identidad was added in 2019. The city's culture institute runs art workshops for locals here.

The small Museo del Cuale, opened in December 1978 among the craft stalls, is a museum of the national institute INAH. It reopened in 2005 with a collection of West Mexican archaeology lent by the regional museums of Guadalajara, Colima and Michoacán: pottery, hunting and gathering tools and finds from shaft-tomb burials. The river can rise fast in the rainy season: in August 2021 floods from Hurricane Nora swamped the island and carried away part of the upstream bridge on Calle Insurgentes. In the dry months the water runs low and clear over the stones.