Taxco silver

An American architecture teacher moved to a poor Mexican town in the 1920s and started an industry that is still running.

Taxco de Alarcon, usually just Taxco, is a small city in the north-central part of the Mexican state of Guerrero, 36 km from Iguala, 135 km from the state capital at Chilpancingo and 170 km southwest of Mexico City. Its name most likely comes from the Nahuatl place name Tlachco, meaning place of the ballgame, though another reading traces it to tatzco, where the father of the water is, after the high waterfall on Atatzin Mountain near the town centre. The de Alarcon honours the writer Juan Ruiz de Alarcon, who was born here.

The city is bound up with silver twice over: with mining it, and with working it into jewellery, silverware and everything else. Only one of those still pays the bills. Mining is no longer a mainstay of the local economy, and tourism has taken over, drawn by the silverwork, the houses and the country around them.

The craft industry has a founder with a date. William Spratling is known as the father of Mexican silver. He designed decorative objects rooted in Mexico's traditional art forms and built from them a trade that still thrives in the region around Taxco, which he found a beautiful but impoverished village.

His route there was unlikely. Spratling was born on 22 September 1900 in Sonyea, New York, lost his mother and a sister young, was orphaned at twelve and separated from his brother and sister. He enrolled at Auburn University in 1917 and was teaching in its architecture department by his sophomore year, then moved in 1921 to a similar post at Tulane University in New Orleans, where he became a leading figure in the city's 1920s cultural renaissance and was pulled into the bohemian life of the French Quarter before he ever went south.

Come for the silver shops, and remember you are buying into a tradition that is younger than it looks.

The mines that fed it (the Prehispanic and colonial workings under the hills) are largely closed, but Taxco silver, stamped .925 with the town hallmark, is sold everywhere here.