Rolling green hills bend sharply into stern peaks along the central Mexican highway. A curve to the left, then right, then an enchanting view: a cascade of whitewashed buildings and red roofs running down the hillside.
Long isolated from other cities, Taxco has tried hard to change very little over the centuries. One of the oldest mining sites in the Americas, its treasures attracted early Conquistadores. Today, famed silver arts - reborn with the help of an American expatriate - draw travelers to the town of cobblestoned streets and colonial ambience.Taxco holds a charm lost - if ever known at all - in the built-up vacation resorts along Mexico's coasts. Though less than a hundred miles south of the Mexico City metropolis, Taxco is an escape from modernity.
Though travelers may have heard about wildfires that recently clouded Mexico's southern skies, the arrival of the rainy season has extinguished the blazes and cleared the air. Most of the rain comes in the form of afternoon showers.
Couples enjoy the twilight breeze on benches in the town's central plaza, beside the towering twin belfries of the 240-year-old Santa Prisca Cathedral. Painters sell images of Taxco and Indians peddle brightly colored crafts of wood and clay. Arm in arm, local girlfriends stroll around the square, discreetly hoping to catch the eyes of passing boys.
Marrying a native son or daughter is the goal of most Taxquenens, according to town historian Javier Ruiz Ocampo. They wish to spend their lives in the small city and continue living in its traditions.
Taxco's roots date to before the Spanish conquest, when Indians called it Tlachco - or place of the ballgame - and, according to legend, paid tribute to their Aztec rulers with gold bars.
Within a year of conquering the Aztecs in 1521, Hernan Cortes made his mining claim in Taxco. By the end of the century, Taxco silver was spread across Europe.
Over the coming centuries, adventurers sought treasures of their own. French-born Don Jose de la Borda struck a fortune in the early 1700s, and in thanks built the Santa Prisca, an ornate, gold-trimmed Spanish Baroque offering where the baron's own son served as priest.
A competition of miners' tributes saw more than a dozen other churches built, Ruiz Ocampo explains while sitting in a cafe patio overlooking cathedral domes and red-tile roofs.
The presence of so many grand churches in the city of 140,000 people is one reason a strong religious fervor sweeps Taxco in the week before Easter, he says.
Each year, members of secret societies pay penitence for their own sins or those of the world by whipping themselves with studded lashes or bearing 100-pound bundles of thorny stalks across their bare shoulders in a nightly parade before thousands of silent tourists and worshipers.
The spectacle of hooded men on the steep stone alleyways, the scent of incense heavy in the air, conjures images of a time long past.
The mood lightens in late May for the Jornadas Alarconianas, a festival of plays, literary readings and dances celebrating writer Juan Ruiz de Alarcon, a 17th-century Taxco son.
In November, the city honors its source of wealth with the Feria de La Plata, or Silver Fair, when silversmiths put their finest pieces on show and the national prize is awarded to the best silver artist.
The art of silver work had died in Taxco during Mexico's 19th-century war for independence, when Spanish barons destroyed their mines rather than lose them to the rebels.
In 1929 - a year after the highway from Mexico City reached Taxco - William Spratling, an architecture professor from Tulane University, arrived and saw the chance for a silver arts renaissance.
Spratling recruited goldsmiths to teach local men. Today, 31 years after Spratling's death, his former students run many of the hundreds of silver shops lining the narrow streets.
Taxco residents continue to pay homage to their adopted son. A silver bust of Spratling sits in the town's silver museum, alongside images of de la Borda and Ruiz de Alarcon. A museum behind the Santa Prisca holds Spratling's collection of silver art and pre-Columbian figures.
A short walk up the hillside - be advised to wear comfortable shoes on the cobblestones - sits the Casa Humboldt, the Baroque home where renowned German geographer and naturalist Alejandro de Humboldt stayed during an 1803 tour. Religious artifacts from the Santa Prisca enhance the sensation of Taxco's living past.
History is only part of the flavor enjoyed in Taxco. Inexpensive restaurants along the streets offer typical Mexican dishes, usually for less than $5. Lucky diners can enjoy the view of the central plaza from upstairs balconies. In the fall, local vendors in the cramped city market sell salsa de jumil, made from ground beetles that swarm in a cloud onto a nearby mountainside every year and are said to have medicinal properties.
The town's 17 hotels, which usually charge about $20 or less a night, offer a range of services. The upper limit - $100 to $150 a night - is the Hotel Monte Taxco, which has rooms overlooking the city, a golf course, horseback riding and suspended cable cars that take guests from the mountaintop inn, high over a rugged canyon and down to the city's edge.
Taxco from the 1930s through the 1960s had been a getaway for Mexican and American celebrities before its popularity was outshone by Acapulco, 175 miles to the west, and other tropical resorts developed with the advent of air conditioning.
However, the charm of the time-forgotten city - complete with its year-round mild temperatures - continues to entice travelers fortunate enough to find her.