Taxco de Alarcón

Where it sits. Taxco de Alarcón is built into a steep flank of the Sierra Madre del Sur in northern Guerrero, about 1,800 metres up and roughly 170 kilometres south-west of Mexico City by the Cuernavaca road. From the highway below, the town reads as a single white cascade of tiled roofs pouring down the mountain under the bare grey crag of Cerro del Atachi. There is almost no flat ground: streets run as ramps and stairways, houses stack on each other's roofs, and the standard taxi for decades has been a white Volkswagen Beetle, small enough to turn in the lanes and low-geared enough to climb them. The full name honours Juan Ruiz de Alarcón, the dramatist of Spain's Golden Age who was born here around 1580.

The story behind it. Spanish prospectors sent by Hernán Cortés were mining here by 1524, making Taxco one of the first mining settlements the Spanish established on the American mainland; the ore was worked for tin and lead as well as silver. The town's defining fortune came two centuries later, when José de la Borda, a Spaniard of French descent, reopened rich veins in the 1740s and became one of New Spain's wealthiest men. He spent an enormous portion of that money on a single building. The Church of Santa Prisca and San Sebastián, built between 1751 and 1758, gives Taxco its skyline: two ornate Churrigueresque towers in rose-pink cantera stone, a tiled dome, and inside a suite of gilded retablos and canvases by Miguel Cabrera, the leading painter of the period.

How it kept its face. Silver faltered again after independence, and the town might have been rebuilt out of recognition had the federal government not declared it a national historic monument in 1928, freezing the colonial appearance — white walls, red tile, wrought-iron balconies, no billboards. The second turning point was the arrival of the American architect and writer William Spratling, who settled here around 1929 and in 1931 opened a workshop, Las Delicias, that trained local apprentices to design and make silver rather than merely dig it. That workshop seeded dozens of family platerías, and silversmithing — not mining — has been Taxco's economy ever since. The Feria Nacional de la Plata each late November has judged the year's best work since 1953.

On screen and in the frame. Because the 1928 protection order stopped the town clock, Taxco reads on camera as an intact eighteenth-century place, and Mexican productions have used it accordingly — Televisa shot the 1985 telenovela Esperándote here, and its plaza, arcades and stepped alleys have supplied period backdrops for domestic cinema, music videos and advertising for decades. It is not a Hollywood location in the way Real de Catorce or Puerto Vallarta became one, and no international blockbuster defines it. What draws the cameras instead is the geometry: white cubes stacked at improbable angles, the pink towers of Santa Prisca rising over red roofs, and a topography that gives a photographer a new elevated viewpoint every fifty metres of climbing.

What you actually see today. The centre is the small, shaded Plaza Borda in front of Santa Prisca, ringed by cafés on balconies. Around it, the Casa Borda of 1759 holds a cultural centre, and the Museo Guillermo Spratling displays pre-Hispanic pieces from the collector's own holdings. The Casa Humboldt, a Moorish-influenced 18th-century merchant house named for Alexander von Humboldt's overnight stay in 1803, now presents religious colonial art. Holy Week here is among the most severe in Mexico: nightly processions in which hooded encruzados carry bundles of thorny blackberry canes across bare shoulders and flagelantes scourge themselves, watched in near silence by thousands. A cable car climbs from the northern edge of town to the Monte Taxco ridge for the wide view.

Getting there and timing. First-class buses run from Mexico City's Taxqueña terminal in about three hours; driving via the Cuernavaca toll road takes a little less. The dry, mild season from October to May is the most comfortable, with summer rains from June to September making the cobbles slick. Nothing about the town is level, and its stairways, kerbs and narrow pavements rule out easy wheelchair access. Silver bought in the platerías should carry the 0.925 stamp; the workshops off the main plaza sell at better prices than the stalls. Grutas de Cacahuamilpa, one of the largest cave systems in the country, lies thirty kilometres north and pairs well with an overnight stay. Because Guerrero's security reputation deters many visitors, Taxco is quieter than a town of this quality would otherwise be; the road corridor from Mexico City through Cuernavaca is the standard, well-travelled approach, and daylight driving is the sensible habit.