It crosses above Calle Zaragoza at the third floor — a small, white, covered bridge connecting two houses on a cobblestone street in Old Town Puerto Vallarta. From below, it looks almost modest. From above, standing on it at dusk with Banderas Bay spread out ahead of you and the city falling away beneath your feet, it is something else entirely.
Richard Burton had it built in 1964.
The story, by now, has the quality of legend — which is appropriate, because it involves two of the most legendary people of the twentieth century. Burton and Taylor came to Puerto Vallarta during the filming of John Huston’s Night of the Iguana. Burton was cast; Taylor was not, but she came anyway, and the two of them — not yet married, already inseparable — acquired houses on either side of this narrow hillside street.
The bridge was practical, in the way that grand romantic gestures sometimes disguise themselves as practical. Rather than navigating the street each time, Burton could walk from his house to hers directly, above the heads of anyone below. Puente del Amor, the locals called it. The Bridge of Love. The name stuck, and has outlasted almost everything else from that era.
What strikes us about the bridge now is not its size — it is genuinely not large — but what it represents about the people who created it. These were two people at the absolute height of their fame, arguably the most photographed couple in the world, and what they wanted, what they went to considerable lengths to build, was privacy. A private crossing between private homes, above a private street, in a city that was then so remote from Hollywood that it might as well have been another world.
The Puente del Amor still connects the two houses — Burton’s former rooms on one side, Taylor’s on the other — and guests who stay in suites on either wing can walk across it themselves. You can read more about the history of these two houses and how they became Casa Kimberly.
We are sometimes asked whether the bridge is a tourist attraction. The answer is complicated. Yes, it appears on lists of things to see in Puerto Vallarta, and yes, people stop to look up at it from the street. But as a lived experience — as a thing you walk across in the early morning, coffee in hand, looking out at the bay — it belongs entirely to the guests who stay here. That feels right to us. It was built for private use. It is still most fully itself in private use.
The Elizabeth Taylor Suite and the Richard Burton Suite sit on opposite ends of the bridge. Of all the ways to spend a week in Puerto Vallarta, staying in one and walking across to the other might be the most particular to this place — the most Casa Kimberly.
The bridge is not the reason people come here. But it tends to be the thing they remember most.
