Villa Amistad
About us

Amistad means friendship.

That is not decoration. Every apartment in this house carries the name of a friend who helped make it what it is, and the two of us, best friends who moved to Puerto Vallarta together, live here too, each in our own apartment on the property, for the whole of your stay.

John, left, and Mark, right, the hosts of Villa Amistad in Puerto VallartaJohn (left) and Mark (right)

We live here. That is the whole difference.

Villa Amistad is not run from an office in another city. We are onsite. When you write about an early arrival, a table for Thursday night, or which beach is worth the walk, you are talking to Mark, who owns the villa and runs it, or John, his best friend and co-host. We each live in our own private apartment here, so someone is always around, and always out of your way.

It also means the small things get handled the same day, whether that is a question about the coffee maker or a recommendation you would rather have from someone who actually eats there. You do not file a request. You ask us.

Named for the people who built it.

Four friends, four apartments. Their names are on the doors because the house genuinely would not exist without them, and because we would rather you stayed somewhere with a name than in Unit 3B.

Put two together and you get the Penthouse or Las Brisas. Take all four and you have the entire villa to yourselves.

The hand-painted sign reading Luis's Escondite beside the office door at Villa Amistad
The hand-painted sign reading Zeferino's Palacio beside Mark's own front door at Villa Amistad

It doesn't stop at the four you can book

Our office has a sign on it too. It reads Luis's Escondite, Luis's hideaway, for the man who hand-painted the antique doors hanging throughout the villa, years before he ever came to work here.

And Mark's own front door, down on the entry level, has a sign beside it that reads Zeferino's Palacio.

Six names on six doors, and four of them you can book. None of it was done for a website.

Why it looks like this.

Terracotta walls, hand-painted tile, Parota wood, hammered copper sinks, blue hand-blown glass, and string lights the length of the building. It is a lot of color, and every bit of it is deliberate.

When we ask guests why they chose us, the answer is almost always the same: it feels like Mexico, not like a white apartment they could have booked anywhere in the world. So we keep painting it red.

Villa Amistad at dusk, terracotta walls lit from inside and string lights along both terraces

A street, not a resort

We are up the hill in El Cerro, where the original village began. The same Mexican families have lived on this alley for generations, and they know us and look out for the place. That is where the safe, welcoming feeling comes from: not a gate and a guard, but neighbors.

Villa Amistad by day among its neighbours' houses on the El Cerro hillside, jungle behindThe villa in its hillside

The people who look after it.

We are not the whole story. Two people keep this place running, and you will meet them both.