Puente del Amor

The Puente del Amor, often called the Elizabeth Taylor bridge, is a small white covered footbridge that crosses Calle Zaragoza at third-floor height, high on the hillside above the Río Cuale in downtown Puerto Vallarta. It links two houses on opposite sides of the steep cobbled street, in the old hillside neighbourhood that foreigners nicknamed Gringo Gulch, a few minutes' climb from the Guadalupe church.

The story goes back to the early 1960s, when John Huston came to film The Night of the Iguana at nearby Mismaloya. Richard Burton was in the cast; Elizabeth Taylor, not yet his wife, came with him, and the two ended up with houses on either side of this lane, Casa Kimberly on one side and a second house across the street. The bridge let them cross from one to the other above the street, out of sight of the photographers who followed the most famous couple of the day. Locals named it the Puente del Amor, the Bridge of Love; gossip has it that it also served for storming off after their famous rows.

Today both houses form the Casa Kimberly boutique hotel, renovated around 2010, with suites named for Taylor and Burton at either end of the bridge; only hotel guests can walk across it. For everyone else it is a street sight: from Calle Zaragoza you look up at the arched white span against the sky, and next to the entrance there is a bronze statue of the couple and a plaque recalling that this was their home. It makes a natural stop on a walk from the Malecón up past the church and down the stairways to Isla Cuale.