Taxco: This Mexican city has a silver lining

TAXCO, Guerrero, Mexico — With apologies to Bogart and John Huston, the real treasure of the Sierra Madre is found clinging handsomely to a one-time mountain of silver less than a two-hour drive from Mexico City via inexpensive modern toll roads. Stunning to the eye for its Mediterranean-inspired architecture of uniformly whitewashed stucco with red ceramic tile roofs, Taxco offers postcard-picturesque views from every vantage. Old World tradition and modern sensibilities combine along narrow cobblestone streets of this Mexican jewel of Spanish colonialism to produce an intoxicating mix of frenzy and charm.

Longevity rarely follows a script. Had this testimonial to man's enterprise and greed traced the familiar boom-bust cycle of innumerable hard-rock mining towns, Taxco would have slipped into either obscurity or parody long ago.

While frontier icons such as Tombstone, Ariz., Deadwood, S.D., or Virginia City, Nev., have lapsed into caricatures of themselves — trading exclusively on their past, Taxco has survived — even thrived — on pluck, luck and never straying too far from its silver heritage. For nearly five centuries it has stubbornly refused becoming a historical asterisk.

Today, this still-vibrant commercial center of 90,000 residents benefits from a forward-thinking decision by the Mexican government in 1928 to declare all of Taxco a "Colonial Monument." The move linked Taxco's future to its storied past and served to promote preservation ahead of wanton development.

Taxco dates to the Aztecs, but its modern roots go back to the Conquistadors, who under the command of Hernando Cortez arrived searching for tin to make bronze for casting cannons. Instead of tin, Taxco's mountains yielded a lucrative consolation — silver — in sufficient amounts to lure fortune-seekers to the region for the next two centuries.

Among those seeking his New World destiny was 17-year-old Joseph de la Borda, who arrived in Taxco in 1716. Young Borda was following in the footsteps of an older miner brother when he made a strike for the ages. A favorite legend actually credits the horse Borda was riding with making the find after scraping the ground with a hoof to reveal a mother lode surface vein of silver.

Whether the horse received a second bag of oats at feeding isn't known. But the strike vaulted both rider and Taxco onto the A list of 18th century affluence. Over the years, Borda's mines produced so much silver that he became one of Europe's most wealthy men, renowned for his generosity and faith as expressed in the mantra commonly attributed to him: "God has given to Borda and Borda gives to God."