Vamos a Taxco

Taxco is a town built on the side of a mountain about 3.5 hours from Acapulco. It is known for its silver and gold mines and jewelry design. Although they still mine silver there, it isn´t what it once was back in the 1600´s. On the other hand, the entire town is filled with little and not so little silver shops with amazing jewelry, plates, tea services, statues, and anything you can think of made with silver.
Caroline, Cory, and I went on a tour of Taxco yesterday. We got up at 6:30am yesterday morning, climbed into a mini van with 5 other people and a driver and took off through the mountains (again!). Happily, our driver, Ruben, was a much more mellow driver than the last one we had! And he was filled with knowledge of the history and ecology of the entire area. We got a whole lesson on the various trees and cactus that grow on the mountains on the way to Taxco. When we got closer to town, we got the history lesson. I won´t give you all the details here, but suffice to say, when the Spaniards took over Mexico, they also took over all the riches they could find, including the mines in Taxco. Additionally, there is a huge church that was built in Taxco. The altars, organ, and most of the church is covered in gold leaf. They are planning to restore the entire church for the 250th anniversary. This will be very time consuming and costly of course. And they are planning ahead at least 10 years to raise the money and begin the actual process of cleaning and re-applying some of the gold. Additionally, there are many original oil paintings of God, Mary, Jesus, all the saints, various bishops, etc. Those will also be restored I presume.
Because Taxco is built on the side of a mountain, and it was built before there were cars and during a time when the indigenous people were not allowed to own any form of transportation, the roads were built for walking. They are mostly still cobblestone roads, very narrow, winding, and quite trecherous if you are not paying attention. Cars actually drive on them, but there are places where no cars can get through. It is actually very similar to Guanajuato in this way. In any case, I highly recommend going if you haven´t been there before.