Taxco

History

The original Taxco, whose Nahuatl name Tlachco means 'place of the ballgame', stood about ten kilometers away at what is now Taxco el Viejo. It was the seat of an Aztec governor who collected tribute from the surrounding provinces, paid in honey, gourds, incense and cloth. The present town sits on a spot once called Tetelcingo, 'small hill'.

Soldiers sent by Hernán Cortés came looking for tin to cast cannon and found silver instead. A mining camp was set up at Tetelcingo in 1528, and by 1570 it and two neighboring camps formed the Real de Minas de Taxco, one of the important mining districts of New Spain. Even so, the town stayed small until the mid-1700s, when the mine owner José de la Borda worked the Pedregal, El Coyote, San Ignacio and Cerro Perdido mines. In 1751 he ordered the building of Santa Prisca, completed in 1758, and is remembered for saying that God gives to Borda and Borda gives to God.

In 1821 Agustín de Iturbide drafted the Plan de Iguala in Taxco's convent of San Bernardino de Siena. The town added 'de Alarcón' in 1872 for the playwright Juan Ruiz de Alarcón, born here. In the 1920s the American William Spratling set up silver design workshops that revived the craft and brought visitors. The historic zone was protected in 1990, and Taxco was named a Pueblo Mágico in 2002.