Taxco - Mexico´s silver mecca

How could I forget to mention Taxco? I have wanted to go there since I saw a picture of the cathedral sitting dramatically on the hillside in a travel book many years ago. In person it wasn’t perched as dramatically as I remember from the photo, but it was still quite beautiful. The city of Taxco was a slight detour from our Cuernavaca to Acapulco route and, unfortunately, we didn’t have enough time to enjoy much of the city. Luckily there was a nice pull off with a gorgeous view of the city where we could snap a few pictures. Most of the buildings are white with red tile roofs, a style I once thought of as Mexican but now realize it really is not common here at all. The cathedral towers above the stores and homes and has amazing paintings and gold leaf sculptures inside. It is difficult to capture it all without the use of a flash. Very dramatic and intricate compared to what we have seen so far and very European. Most of the gold leaf had thick layers of dust and they are in the middle of a multi-million dollar restoration process for the entire cathedral but, from my interpretation of the signs, they have run out of money so are currently on hold.

The city is famous for silver production and you can’t walk more than a dozen steps without stumbling upon a silver shop. Actually, you can’t walk more than a dozen steps without somebody coming up to you and trying to “guide” you into certain shops. I don’t know if it was the combination of two gringas walking around with Felipe (whom the assumed spoke some Spanish) that drew the guides to him like bears to honey, but they were relentlessly following us everywhere. We would walk out of one store and they would immediately try to guide us to another.

The city seems to be entirely uphill with cobblestone streets that are so narrow in some places I felt like the three of us couldn’t even walk side by side. Somehow, little green and white slug bug taxis relentlessly zip up and down like mice in a maze. However, if you drive, I definitely recommend stopping at the very first parking lot you see and taking a taxi into town. There are many one way streets and it is a very old city with very old roads! If you are in Acapulco, Cuernavaca or Mexico City, you could easily do Taxco as a daytrip on the bus. Just make sure to take the air-conditioned first class bus if you’re here during the hot months!
After at least 20 silver shops which either had nothing we liked or what we liked was too out of our price range, we ascended about 5 flights of stairs to eat on a rooftop café with a view of the cathedral and plaza. Even though we were walking towards the staircase on our own a guide still managed to come up to Felipe and had us follow him up the stairs to the restaurant. I’m not sure what the point is in all that but it seems to be the way they work. After a somewhat expensive and not very good lunch we grabbed a taxi back to our car. The view from the restaurant was almost worth the price. People had laundry hanging on lines on their rooftops just like I remember in Jerusalem. I guess when you have no yard and no dryers you find the only space available. On the way we saw a street a block from the zocalo which we should have walked down but didn’t that had some very nice non-silver crafts. We’ll save those for next time… and maybe some silver too.