Acapulco’s journey from colonial harbour to Hollywood playground, and from glamour capital to a city redefining its identity in the shadow of violence and catastrophe.
There is a photograph, taken sometime around 1957, of Elizabeth Taylor reclining on a sun-bleached terrace above Acapulco Bay. In the frame behind her: the Pacific stretches all the way to the horizon, impossibly blue. Below: a horseshoe of cliffs and sand that, in that moment, seemed to contain the very idea of paradise.
That image – and a thousand like it – defined a city for a generation. Acapulco was not merely a resort. It was a state of mind.
A place where Hollywood came to exhale, where American presidents spent their honeymoons, where the jet-set invented themselves anew against a backdrop of warm water and warm nights.
The story of what happened next – of how that paradise was eroded, complicated, battered and partially dismantled – is one of the most instructive tales in the history of modern tourism.
It is a story about glamour and poverty, about the fragility of reputation, and about what happens when a city becomes too many things to too many people at the same time.
Before the Stars: A Colonial Port and a Manila Trade Route
Long before Frank Sinatra ever set foot on its shores, Acapulco was already one of the most strategically significant ports in the world.
The Spanish established a settlement here in the 16th century, and for nearly 250 years – from 1565 to 1815 – it served as the Pacific terminus of the Manila Galleon trade route, the artery along which silver from Mexican mines flowed west to Asia and silk, porcelain and spice flowed back east.
The Fuerte de San Diego, a star-shaped fortress built in 1616 and rebuilt following an earthquake in 1776, still stands today as a reminder of those centuries of strategic importance.
For a brief but intense period, Acapulco was one of the wealthiest and most cosmopolitan ports in the entire Spanish Empire.
Then the galleon trade ended, independence came to Mexico, and Acapulco retreated into a long, quiet obscurity. It would take the 20th century – and the arrival of a very different kind of traveller – to put it back on the map.
Hollywood Discovers Paradise: The 1940s and 1950s
The transformation began, as so many transformations do, with a single charismatic figure. Teddy Stauffer – a Swiss-born former swing musician who somehow found himself managing hotels on Mexico’s Pacific coast – recognised what others had missed: that Acapulco’s extraordinary natural setting, its horseshoe bay of warm water flanked by dramatic cliffs and lush mountains, was precisely the kind of escapist backdrop that a war-weary, celebrity-obsessed postwar world was hungry for.
Stauffer, nicknamed „Mister Acapulco,“ managed the Villa Vera and Casablanca hotels and proceeded to fill them with the most famous names in the world.
He understood, perhaps instinctively, that celebrity begets celebrity: once the right people were seen in a place, other right people would follow.
| Who Came to Acapulco: A Partial Roll Call ▪ Elizabeth Taylor honeymooned here with Mike Todd (1957) ▪ John & Jackie Kennedy – honeymoon, September 1953; caught a marlin they mounted in the White House ▪ Frank Sinatra & the Rat Pack – regular visitors throughout the 1950s and 1960s ▪ Rock Hudson – honeymoon with Phyllis Gates, February 1956 ▪ John Wayne & Johnny Weissmüller – co-owners of Los Flamingos hotel; Weissmüller lived out his days in Acapulco ▪ Orson Welles & Rita Hayworth – filmed The Lady from Shanghai here, 1946 ▪ Brigitte Bardot, Cary Grant, Errol Flynn – among many dozens of regular visitors ▪ Elvis Presley – immortalised the city in the 1963 film Fun in Acapulco |
What these visitors found was, by any measure, extraordinary. The bay was one of the most naturally beautiful on the Pacific coast.
The clifftop hotels offered a combination of privacy and spectacle that the newly invented concept of “the celebrity vacation“ demanded.
And the local culture offered something that Europe, still rebuilding from the war, could not: warmth, informality, and a particular kind of effortless theatricality.
“Acapulco had everything a star could want: beauty, remoteness, warmth and the sense that the ordinary rules did not quite apply here.”
The Divers of La Quebrada: A Living Symbol
No single image came to represent Acapulco more vividly than the cliff divers of La Quebrada – young men who, since the 1930s, have been launching themselves from a rocky promontory 35 metres above a narrow ocean inlet, timing their dives to rise on the incoming waves to avoid the rocks below.
The practice, which requires extraordinary physical preparation and an almost supernatural sense of timing, quickly became one of the most photographed spectacles in the world.
It appeared in travel magazines, newsreels, and eventually Hollywood productions, cementing Acapulco’s image as a place where the ordinary laws of caution and restraint were cheerfully suspended.
The divers still perform today – multiple times daily, including by torchlight at night – in what is perhaps the most durable of all the city’s original attractions.
The First Cracks: Competition, Pollution, and the Fading of Glamour
Even at the height of its fame, the seeds of Acapulco’s difficulties were quietly being planted. The most significant threat came not from violence or weather but from deliberate policy: the Mexican government’s decision, from the late 1960s onward, to develop entirely new resort destinations from scratch.
Cancún, whose now-iconic hotel zone was essentially purpose-built on an undeveloped Caribbean coastline in the early 1970s, offered everything that Acapulco did not: modern infrastructure, direct international flight connections, and the absence of an existing urban population with all its attendant complications.
The Riviera Maya followed. Cabo San Lucas was developed. One by one, Mexico’s newer resorts peeled away the international leisure market that had once flowed naturally to Acapulco.
By the 1980s, a second problem had become impossible to ignore. The bay, which had once been famously clear, was suffering from the effects of rapid urbanisation without adequate sewage infrastructure.
Pollution, overcrowding, and the visual chaos of unchecked development along the waterfront eroded the very qualities that had made the city desirable. The older hotels, which had once defined glamour, began to look their age.
In a peculiarly modern irony, Acapulco had become a victim of its own success. The mass tourism that had replaced the jet-set in the 1970s and 1980s brought revenue but also congestion, environmental damage, and the gradual dilution of the qualities that had made the destination distinctive in the first place.
The Drug War Arrives: A City Under Siege
What competition and pollution had begun, the Mexican drug war accelerated and deepened into something qualitatively different.
Acapulco sits in the state of Guerrero, which borders the Sierra Madre mountains – a region long used for opium poppy cultivation and which became, from the mid-2000s onward, a major front in the cartel conflicts that were tearing Mexico apart.
Locals often identify January 27, 2006 – when a firefight between police and cartel members in Acapulco left multiple people dead – as the moment the city’s safe world ended.
“That’s when all the sadness and all the evil began in Acapulco,” one jewellery shop owner, whose business subsequently failed, told Vice magazine.
What followed was a spiral of violence that defied the efforts of successive governments to contain it.
The fundamental problem was structural: President Felipe Calderón’s 2006 military crackdown on the major cartels was, in one sense, effective – but the effect was to splinter the larger organisations into dozens of smaller, more volatile factions, each fighting for control of territory, drug routes and extortion rackets. Guerrero, and Acapulco in particular, became the epicentre of this splintering.
| The Human Cost: Acapulco in Numbers ▪ 2015: 903 homicides – 104 per 100,000 inhabitants, fourth highest rate in the world [6] ▪ 2016: 918 murders – 103 per 100,000; Mexican and international ‘most dangerous city’ rankings [1] ▪ 2018: Acapulco’s entire police force disarmed by the military over suspected cartel infiltration [1] ▪ 2024-2025: 560 homicides (71 per 100,000) – still Mexico’s 34th most violent municipality [7] ▪ Hotel occupancy fell to 40% at the height of the security crisis [8] ▪ U.S. State Department: Do Not Travel advisory for Guerrero state (including Acapulco) [6] |
The human geography of the violence was grimly instructive. For years, a kind of informal demarcation line existed along Avenida La Costera Miguel Alemán, the palm-lined boulevard linking the cliff hotels to the old quarter.
The tourist zone – known as the Golden Zone – remained, for a time, relatively insulated. But as turf wars among the miniature cartels intensified, the line between the violent city and the tourist city became increasingly difficult to maintain.
“Nobody would have thought you could lose a city like Acapulco. I think Acapulco is a total lesson.”
– Claudio Lomnitz, anthropologist at Columbia University
The international tourist had largely abandoned Acapulco by the late 2010s. Annual visitor numbers fell sharply: Canadian arrivals dropped from 5,918 in 2011 to 3,570 in 2016.
The visitors who remained were predominantly domestic – Mexican nationals for whom the price point remained attractive and for whom the risk calculus was different.
October 2023: The Storm That Was Never Supposed to Happen
Acapulco has always known hurricanes. What it had never known – what no city on Mexico’s Pacific coast had ever experienced in the modern era – was what arrived in the early hours of October 25, 2023.
Hurricane Otis had been, just 24 hours earlier, a relatively modest tropical storm. Then it underwent what meteorologists call rapid intensification of almost unprecedented violence: wind speeds increased by 115 mph within a single day, and Otis made landfall near Acapulco as a Category 5 hurricane with sustained winds of 165 mph and gusts recorded at over 200 mph. It was, according to the National Hurricane Center, the strongest hurricane ever to make landfall in the Eastern Pacific in the satellite era.
Because the storm had been forecast to remain weak and stay offshore, the more than one million people living in and around the city had almost no time to prepare. The consequences were catastrophic.
| Hurricane Otis – Key Facts (October 25, 2023) ▪ Category 5 at landfall: sustained winds 165 mph, gusts exceeding 200 mph [11] ▪ Strongest recorded Pacific landfalling hurricane in history, surpassing Hurricane Patricia (2015) [11] ▪ At least 52 confirmed fatalities; thousands displaced [12] ▪ Over 34,500 families displaced; 560,000+ residents affected [13] ▪ 95% of Acapulco’s businesses damaged [14] ▪ Total economic damage: US$12-16 billion – the costliest hurricane in Mexican history [12] ▪ Guerrero state GDP projected to fall 16% in early 2024 as a result [11] ▪ The name ‘Otis’ has since been permanently retired by the World Meteorological Organization [11] |
The imagery that emerged in the days after landfall was almost surreal. The high-rise hotels along the waterfront – those gleaming towers that had once welcomed the world’s most glamorous guests – had their facades torn away, their interiors exposed to the open sky.
The marina was destroyed. Beaches that had taken decades to develop were stripped of their sand in a matter of hours.
Scientists noted a deeply uncomfortable dimension to the catastrophe: Otis’ extraordinary rapid intensification had been fuelled, at least in part, by unusually high sea surface temperatures in the waters off Guerrero – a direct consequence of the same warming ocean that is driving more frequent and more intense extreme weather events globally. The storm was not simply a natural disaster. It was also a data point.
“The unforecasted and exceptional suddenness by which Otis strengthened, fed by a warmer ocean, is a brutal example of the storms scientists say humans can expect in a climate changed by planet-warming pollution.”
– CNN, October 2023
What Remains: A City in the Process of Becoming Something Else
Acapulco has not disappeared. It is important to be clear about this. The city of nearly 800,000 people continues to function, continues to receive tourists – primarily domestic – and continues to possess the natural endowments that made it famous in the first place.
The horseshoe bay is still there. The cliffs are still there. The divers of La Quebrada still throw themselves into the sea every evening, timed to the incoming waves.
The Fort of San Diego, which has survived four centuries of earthquakes, hurricanes and social upheaval, still stands and still operates as a museum.
The deep-water harbour still accommodates cruise ships. The local cultural institutions, the markets, the cuisine – all of these persist.
But the city that exists today is unambiguously a different city from the one that Elizabeth Taylor photographed. International tourism – the kind that fills five-star hotels, that generates the glossy magazine spreads, that brings the economic multiplier effects of high-spending foreign visitors – has largely not returned.
The travel warnings from the U.S. State Department, Canada and several European governments remain in place, citing the continued activity of cartel-linked violence in Guerrero state. Recovery from Hurricane Otis, while real, remains incomplete.
There are those, both within and outside Acapulco, who argue for grounds for cautious optimism. National homicide figures across Mexico showed a decline of almost 25% in the first nine months of 2025, according to official data. The city retains an active domestic tourism economy. Some hotels have been rebuilt and reopened.
But the broader picture remains sobering. Acapulco still ranked as Mexico’s 34th most violent municipality in the 2024-2025 data. The structural conditions that generated the violence – poverty, inequality, weak institutions, the geography of drug trafficking – have not been fundamentally resolved. And the climate trajectory that produced Otis has not reversed.
A Mirror for the Modern World
The story of Acapulco resists easy summary. It is not simply a story of decline, because decline implies a trajectory that ended somewhere. It is, instead, a story of transformation – ongoing, unresolved, and in many ways still being written.
What it does offer, with unusual clarity, is a set of object lessons for thinking about how cities become desirable, how that desirability is sustained or squandered, and what happens when the forces shaping a place – economic, social, climatic, political – turn against it simultaneously.
The celebrity era of Acapulco was real. The images were genuine. The parties happened. John Kennedy really did catch that fish. Frank Sinatra really did drink at the bars above the bay.
But that era was also, in retrospect, built on a foundation that was always more fragile than the photographs suggested: a city that was glamorous in its tourist zone while the state that surrounded it remained among the poorest and most marginalised in Mexico.
That contradiction – between the gleaming surface and the complicated reality beneath – is not unique to Acapulco. It is, in various forms, the story of almost every resort city that has ever existed. What is unusual about Acapulco is the sheer force with which that contradiction eventually made itself felt.
“Acapulco’s heyday of international fame may have faded. But its legacy as an icon of mid-20th century glamour – and its story as a city that has survived more than most – lives on.”
Sources & Further Reading
[1] Wikipedia – Acapulco. Comprehensive overview of the city’s history, geography and current situation. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acapulco
[2] Britannica – Acapulco. britannica.com/place/Acapulco
[3] Hollywood Reporter – Vintage Photos of Hollywood Stars in Acapulco. hollywoodreporter.com/gallery/vintage-photos-hollywood-stars-acapulco-688107
[4] Vice – Ten Years Into Mexico’s Drug War, the Violence in Acapulco Rages On. vice.com
[5] Travel Squire – Acapulco, Mexico’s Hall of Fame (Los Flamingos hotel and the Hollywood Gang). travelsquire.com/acapulco-mexicos-hall-of-fame
[6] CBC News – As gangs fight in the street, violence-plagued Acapulco battles to lure back tourists. March 2017. cbc.ca
[7] Mexico News Daily – 5 Tourism Destinations Among Mexico’s Most Violent Municipalities (2024–2025 data). mexiconewsdaily.com
[8] The Daily Beast – Acapulco: Tourist Mecca and Cartel Murder Capital. thedailybeast.com
[9] Council on Foreign Relations – Criminal Violence in Mexico (Global Conflict Tracker). cfr.org/global-conflict-tracker/conflict/criminal-violence-mexico
[10] CNN – El Mencho’s death exposed Mexico’s cartel crisis. February 2026. cnn.com
[11] Wikipedia – Hurricane Otis. Full meteorological and damage record. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Otis
[12] National Hurricane Center (NOAA) – Tropical Cyclone Report: Hurricane Otis (EP18 2023). nhc.noaa.gov/data/tcr/EP182023_Otis.pdf
[13] ScienceDirect – Hurricane Otis: Category 5 Storm Effects and Cascading Hazards in Acapulco Bay. sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2950474025000031
[14] Center for Disaster Philanthropy – Hurricane Otis. disasterphilanthropy.org/disasters/hurricane-otis
[15] CNN – Hurricane Otis Before-and-After Images, October 2023. cnn.com/2023/10/27/weather/hurricane-otis-acapulco-mexico-images-climate
[16] La Quebrada – Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Quebrada_(Acapulco)
[17] FideTur Acapulco – Hollywood’s Decades-Long Love Affair with Acapulco. fideturacapulco.mx
