When William Spratling arrived in 1929, Taxco was a spent mining town clinging to hillsides in the mountains of Guerrero. Silver had shaped the place since the Spanish colonial period -- the Ex Hacienda del Chorrillo, built by knights of Hernan Cortes, dates to the 1530s, and its aqueduct from 1534 still partially survives. But by the early twentieth century, the mines were winding down and Taxco had little to show the world. Spratling, an American artist and architect, saw something else: a town full of skilled metalworkers with no market for their craft. He visited nearby Iguala and enlisted master silversmiths Artemio Navarrete, Alfonso Mondragon, and Wenceslao Herrera. His first workshop opened on Calle de Las Delicias. Instead of raw ore leaving town on trucks, finished jewelry began leaving in display cases. Today, over 3,000 silversmith artisans work in Taxco, and the town calls itself the Silver Capital of the World.

Taxco's main plaza, officially Plaza Borda, is the kind of place where a single building tells you everything about the terrain. The Casa Borda -- the most important non-religious colonial structure in town -- has two stories facing the plaza and five stories facing the Plaza de Bernal behind it. The ground simply drops away that steeply. Monumental pedestrian stairways connect one level of the town to the next. Around the plaza, silver shops crowd alongside restaurants and bars, and the Zocalo fills with vendors and visitors. Nearby stand two museums: the William Spratling Museum, housing silver and archaeological pieces from Spratling's personal collection, and the Museum of Viceregal Art, set in the so-called Humboldt House -- named because the German naturalist Alexander von Humboldt spent a single night there in 1803. One night, and the building carries his name two centuries later.

Holy Week in Taxco has drawn international attention since at least 1622, when processions first took place in the atrium of the Church of San Bernardino de Siena. Between Palm Sunday and Easter Sunday, ten major processions wind through the steep streets -- six in the evening, four during the day. Each covers roughly two and a half kilometers over about two hours. The ceremonies now center on Santa Prisca Church. But Taxco's cultural identity goes beyond the religious calendar. The local cuisine features jumiles -- a type of stink bug -- prepared in tacos or mole sauce, alongside cecina, plum and bean tamales, and a honey margarita called berta. The Church of San Bernardino de Siena, the oldest in the area, was built at the end of the sixteenth century and restored in the nineteenth after a fire. Its former convent orchard is now the garden of a hotel, a quiet transformation that captures how Taxco layers one era over another without erasing what came before.

The last major mining operation near Taxco, Industrial Minera Mexico S.A., phased out operations beginning in 2007 due to depleted reserves and labor problems. Mining is no longer a major employer. What Spratling set in motion nearly a century ago has proven more durable than the mines themselves -- the economy now runs on silverwork and the tourism it draws. The Church of Veracruz holds an image of Christ nicknamed "The General." On the plaza outside it, one of three monuments to the playwright Juan Ruiz de Alarcon marks the neighborhood where he was born. Basketball, not soccer, is the most popular sport in Taxco Municipality. Transport through the steep streets relies on taxis and Kombis -- converted Volkswagen vans that serve as minibuses, threading through lanes too narrow and too vertical for anything larger. Taxco is a town shaped entirely by what lies beneath it and what its people have learned to do with their hands.