Jalisco
Photographers in Puerto Vallarta
Puerto Vallarta is a resort city in Jalisco on the eastern shore of Banderas Bay, where the Sierra Madre drops almost straight into the Pacific. The town faces west across the water, which is why the sun sets over the bay rather than behind a hill, and why most sessions here are booked for the last 90 minutes of daylight. The Río Ameca, which reaches the sea just north of the airport, is the state line: everything north of it, Nuevo Vallarta included, is Nayarit.
The city runs as a strip from north to south. Marina Vallarta and the Hotel Zone sit beside the Aeropuerto Internacional Lic. Gustavo Díaz Ordaz (PVR), roughly 2 to 4 km from the runway. Downtown and the Malecón are about 8 km south of it, and the Zona Romántica, with the Los Muertos pier and the Isla del Río Cuale, lies just beyond. Past the Zona Romántica the coastal highway climbs through Amapas and Conchas Chinas to Mismaloya, about 10 km south of the Malecón in a straight line, where the hills close in and the beaches become coves.
That layout decides how a drone shoot is planned. Mexico’s drone standard, NOM-107-SCT3-2019, keeps drones 9.2 km from any aerodrome without special authorisation and bans flight within 3.7 km even with one. Marina Vallarta falls inside the inner ring, the Malecón and Los Muertos inside the outer one, and Conchas Chinas sits about 10 km out, just past it. Every paid drone flight here is flown by a Mexican-registered, insured local pilot, because the standard restricts foreign operators.
The clients are mostly couples and families from the United States and Canada on direct flights, plus a large share of destination weddings in the Hotel Zone and the south-shore resorts. Beaches are public under federal law, so a session on the sand needs no ticket, but a hotel’s grounds are private and each property sets its own rules for outside photographers. A foreign photographer on tourist status may not do paid work in Mexico, so the photographer who shoots your session lives and works here.
