deep in the mountains of the state of Guerrero sits a town that was once one of the largest suppliers of silver in the Spanish Empire Though it produces less silver now than in years past Taxco is still world-renowned for its intricate silver jewelry creations and family-run workshops that attract thousands of visitors every year the town offers a wide variety of cultural attractions that exist thanks to mining From one of Mexico’s most famous churches — built with silver money — to a hidden pre-Columbian silver mine and a City of Light award here are 5 surprising things you didn’t know about Mexico’s most famous silver town Sitting atop steep hills and surrounded by dramatic cliffs Taxco — whose official name is Taxco de Alarcón — was founded in 1529 But it wasn’t the first Taxco: the Indigenous town of that name Hernán Cortés sent an expedition to find tin ore and a few years later the Spanish set up the mining camp that would soon become the city of Taxco making it one of the oldest European mining centers in the Americas its true mining heyday happened in the 18th century after Spanish businessman José de la Borda inherited a mine from his brother Francisco and found the San Ignacio vein who would be described by Spanish King Carlos III as “the most intelligent person known in this Kingdom in mines and in the machinery for their excavation,” made one of the largest fortunes in New Spain with silver mining he built a paved road across the mountains to Mexico City gave money to the Catholic church and built several buildings for the local community including the town’s icon: the Parish of Santa Prisca — which leads us to our next interesting fact The church of Santa Prisca was built by de la Borda as a way of thanking God for his mining fortune Santa Prisca — named after the town’s patron saint — is one of Mexico’s most beautiful churches and an exquisite example of the Mexican baroque style it was actually Mexico’s tallest building until 1808 In addition to its magnificent interior and stunning light-pink façade the church is noteworthy for having been built in just seven years between 1751 and 1758 — a record speed for the time several well-known Mexican artists of the 18th century contributed to the church’s interior decoration Due to its “great artistic value,” UNESCO included Santa Prisca on Mexico’s tentative list for World Heritage inscription in 2001 Taxco remained relatively unknown to the world until artist William Spratling revived the town’s old silver glory An assistant professor of architecture at Tulane University Spratling spent his summers lecturing on colonial architecture in Mexico City and touring the country in his free time he decided to settle down in Taxco to work on his novel Intrigued by the silver trinkets and stones that Taxco locals sold Spratling began designing his own jewelry inspired by Aztec motifs and Mexican designs he hired local silversmiths and founded his workshop his works gained international recognition and many Hollywood celebrities of the time wore his designs Notable students who founded their own shops included Antonio Pineda Dubbed “the Father of Modern Mexican Jewelry,” Spratling turned the world’s attention to Taxco and its silversmiths who to this day have remained relevant and recognized worldwide If you thought finding hidden treasure underground only happens in fairy tales during renovation work at Taxco’s Posada de la Misión hotel construction workers lowering a floor discovered an underground pit that led them to the entrance of a mine with deposits of silver National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) archeologists found that the work that had been done in the mine was superficial and rudimentary using tools that predated the colonial era stones and baskets to collect the minerals historians have suggested that the mine was pre-Columbian exploited by the Indigenous Chontal of Guerrero — not to be confused with the Chontal Maya — in the 1400s the mine is safe from further exploitation Entrance costs 180 pesos per person and includes a walking tour inside the mine parking and a drink in the Posada de la Misión hotel Due to the number of international tourists that travel to Taxco for silver shopping the town decided to elevate its already charming cobbled streets red tile roofs and colonial buildings with architectural light In 2019, Taxco gained international recognition as a City of Light, thanks to the town’s light plan. The accolade is granted by the Lighting Urban Community International (LUCI) association which brings together cities across the world committed to using light as a tool for sustainable development uses light as a common thread to seamlessly integrate streets and alleys with churches It has encouraged more social gatherings and recreational activities and has helped extend the use of city space at night This title is shared with other cities like Geneva Colombia are the only cities in the Americas to have received the honor Gabriela Solis is a Mexican lawyer turned full-time writer She was born and raised in Guadalajara and covers business lifestyle and travel for Mexico News Daily You can follow her lifestyle blog Dunas y Palmeras ADVERTISE WITH MND COMMUNITY GUIDELINES Subscription FAQ's Privacy Policy Mexico News Daily - Property of Tavana LLC The first stop on California’s barbacoa trail is LA where you can find more more regional styles of barbacoa crammed together than any place on earth Hidden under a lemon yellow tarp in the parking lot of an old print shop just a half block south of Slauson Avenue’s frenetic street food corridor of taco trucks and grilled chicken stands is indisputable proof that Los Angeles is one of the best places on earth for barbacoa the humming street stand features a style that’s uncommon even in Mexico and is almost exclusively known by those from the city of Taxco de Alarcón just a few miles south of LA’s trendy Arts District The stand’s barbacoyero — the Mexican equivalent of the pitmaster — is Julio Jaimes a former Mexico City police officer who learned Taxco-style barbacoa de chivo (goat barbacoa) from his wife but I’m a fan of the process,” says Jaimes The process he’s talking about is barbacoa: an ancestral Mexican cooking technique of wrapping meat in leaves — often maguey — stacking it over a wood fire and cooking it slowly in an underground pit oven lined with yet more leaves A stockpot is tucked beneath to catch the drippings for what eventually becomes a rich consomé which you sip alongside tacos filled with the slow-cooked barbacoa meat for what’s indisputably Mexico’s most celebrated weekend breakfast and they aren’t just regional — they’re micro-regional Before Europeans conquered what is now Mexico in the early 16th century barbacoa featured Indigenous proteins like iguana it’s mostly lamb and goat in the Mexican Central Plateau and pork for cochinita pibil in the Yucatán it’s usually seasoned simply with salt or rubbed in adobo (a pungent marinade of dried chiles too — pancita (taut pouches of offal-stuffed stomach) mixiotes (packets of seasoned meat wrapped in leaves or parchment) and whole heads — that are considered key parts of barbacoa and ooze with the primal essence of the pit a nod to the Taxco-born customers who come at dawn for delicacies like consomé con pata (consomme with goat foot) with fresh goat marrow scooped straight from the bone to the bowl and eaten with corn tortillas There are also other favorites from the Taxco bill of fare like chopped sesos (goat brains) and sweet fragrant pancita that’s slathered in the same brick red adobo that dresses the cuts of juicy roasted goat meat Barbacoa is almost exclusively eaten on weekend mornings or for large celebrations in barbacoa regions It’s less of a meal than it is an event — an early gathering of friends and coworkers who linger and chat over piles of ancestral foods most traces of the goat delicacies have been stripped off the bone and devoured by regulars in the know as the fattier scent of the more fashionable lamb takes over The best cuts go to the ones who arrive early Jaimes’s barbacoa represents one regional style — in this case Taxco style — among a panoply of hyper-local barbacoa variations that originated across Mexico When we’re talking about regional variations of barbacoa we’re often talking less about the meat itself and more about the accompanying dishes and accoutrements the style is in the options and the aftermarket parts and local antojitos (small snacks) that adorn the menu alongside the smoky lamb or goat are what signal a barbacoyero’s particular hometown Same goes for the different chiles used in salsas and adobos or the spread of condiments on hand to finish each bite Many American food writers tend to get hung up on these types of broad truths about regional Mexican cooking — how in one state the consomé always features chipotle or how in another they always make quesadillas with the lamb’s sweetbreads and clinging to them as metrics of authenticity diminishes the creative contributions of the barbacoa masters themselves while erasing small-town conventions and the individual cooks who have carried these intricate recipes through the generations have more than enough authority to break the rules There is one thing we can confidently say is true: No matter the style or regional touchstone all barbacoa eventually gets eaten as tacos It usually begins with a warm corn tortilla filled with the meat of your choice and dressed with any number of salsas At the central market in the Mexican city of Texcoco women carry large flat baskets loaded with plastic cups of salsa and fava beans — ready to rush your table the minute the barbacoa arrives you’ll often find a lineup of small containers holding everything from quelites the term for any sort of wild herby greens like pápaloquelite or pipicha; cilantro and onions; salsas of infinite hues — red even crushed insects like chinicuiles or gusanos A second taco might include some pancita pinched with a tortilla and spooned with salsa or whatever other special offerings emerge from the pit: mixiotes there’s always a cup of potent consomé for sipping on the side My own first experience with barbacoa came relatively late in life I’m what you’d call a pocho — a Central Valley-born Mexican American who grew up neither here nor there — and I came to know the dishes and techniques of barbacoa through a handful of popular spots around Southern California my career as a touring musician and food writer gave me the chance to eat my way across Mexico where I encountered a mind-boggling range of cooking traditions including seemingly endless styles of pit-cooked meat But while I’ve now sampled the very best of Mexico’s barbacoa towns I’ve repeatedly found myself equally excited by my finds right here in California After 15 years of exploring food more or less for a living I continue to giddily stumble upon hyper-regional practices specific to small Mexican towns and Indigenous communities in suburban backyards and Sunday-only street stands across the state I’m repeatedly floored by deft barbacoyeros like Jaimes who are eager to show off the flavors of their pueblos thousands of miles from home infinite permutations of barbacoa to try throughout my home state is the beginning of a journey — a series of smoke-filled road trips up and down California’s highways to explore the vast range of local barbacoa carefully peeling layer after layer of charred maguey spines to prove my thesis: that California has a hidden barbacoa trail cut by waves of immigration and restaurants that could never exist in any one Mexican state but by some delicious miracle you’ll find commingling here in the Golden State which happens to be the best place outside of Mexico to expand your barbacoa palate It’s been argued that the second-largest city in Mexico is Despite its well-earned reputation for standstill traffic and town within every region within every state in Mexico These immigrants are the ones disproportionately churning through their days at construction sites and in hotel bowels — gutting it out Monday through Friday (at the least) with their eyes and appetites set on one thing: the weekend weekends are marked by the smell of fresh-cut turf and old books weekends are ushered in with the thick oily scent of barbacoa an aroma so dense it seems to slow the very pace of life of course — there are other weekend-only Mexican specialties too and mariscos con banda for sinaloenses and nayaritas But for large swaths of people from central and parts of southern Mexico and all the squinty-eyed ramblers seeking a cure for last night you’ll find thousands of Mexicans who worked their bodies to the brink all week but have managed to get up at dawn for the chance to eat alongside friends and family A few miles across town in the cushy homes and apartments of Silver Lake or Malibu a very different kind of Angeleno won’t roll out for their boozy brunch till noon for the droves of immigrant workers who can’t afford the luxury of a weekend off — there’s also the uniquely LA phenomenon of barbacoa for dinner but it’s hard to survive on two morning’s worth of income a week in a town like Los Angeles so the barbacoyeros here do what immigrants have done for centuries: They adapt Within the 25,806 square miles of Los Angeles you can feast on regional barbacoa traditions from the Mexican states of Hidalgo or white goat barbacoa tacos from Tlacotepec it’s Tepeaca-style lamb barbacoa tacos with mole de panza enchilada (lamb menudo) You’ll find lamb in adobo from Texcoco in Commerce and at Compton’s open-air Restaurant Onofre the tacos de pancita blanca (white pancita) draw a Morelos crowd There’s even the rare steamed lamb barbacoa from Oaxaca’s Sierra Norte at Poncho’s Tlayudas It would not be overselling to say that there are more styles of barbacoa crammed together in the city of Los Angeles than in the very capital of Mexico Leaving Jaimes and his Taxco-style feasts in South LA I head up the ever-widening 110 freeway to the 10 west — whizzing (on a good day) past Hidalgo-style barbacoa carts and the Adams-Normandie collection of Capulhuac-style barbacoa trucks and backyard stands — all the way to Arlington Heights There’s a term that’s used to reflect the unique cultural overlap of Indigenous Oaxacans and their adopted home of Southern California — Oaxacalifornia It’s a word invented by Oaxacans to describe transnational relationships between Oaxacan villages and their Indigenous cultures represented in barrios across California and it permeates every inch of the Arlington Heights restaurant known as Gish Bac dressed in a chef’s jacket and toque behind a line of giant stockpots a third-generation barbacoyera and bona fide Oaxacalifornia legend from Oaxaca’s famed Mercado de Tlacolula “Gish Bac’’ translates to “our town of Tlacolula,” which is a village in Oaxaca’s Valles Centrales and the menu spotlight’s the region’s renowned gastronomy On red-and-white zapoteco patterned tablecloths you’ll find dishes like barbacoa enchilada steamed goat meat rubbed in smoky adobo and served swimming in the bright red consomé Ramos also makes excellent barbacoa blanca the Tlacolula version of lamb barbacoa that’s seasoned with just salt and pepper barbacoa is a matriarchal dominion where traditional cooks partially fill a stockpot with water and seasoning for the consomé then add layers of avocado leaves to support large pieces of goat slathered in a fruity adobo then the whole pot is steamed in an earthen pit — this is a one-pot cook Gish Bac also uses a large pot in which Ramos inserts a fitted grate and stacks the meat like a cathedral dome of flesh and bones the whole pot is covered in avocado leaves and sealed with oven wrap to trap the juices before it’s subjected to hours of slow steaming Seated at one of the small tables on Gish Bac’s covered patio lined with tropical plants hand-pressed corn tortilla called a blandita and plunge it into a bowl of Ramos’s pungent consomé I dunk it several times to ensure a thorough coat of the auburn-hued broth seasoned with dried chiles and any number of other ancestral secrets passed down to Ramos One bite is transportive; two and I’m gone “This the only Oaxacan restaurant I ever go to,” says José Ruiz a craft vendor at LA’s annual Feria de Tejate a celebration of the pre-Hispanic drink of cacao and maize where Gish Bac is a frequent vendor and organizer she is the only one that makes barbacoa enchilada like the original,” he says of Ramos Ruiz can likely enjoy Oaxacan staples like memelas and molotes at home he goes to a specialist — someone who’s been bestowed with a sacred recipe honed by generations of traditional cooks it’s due east 30 minutes to the San Gabriel Valley known for its regional Chinese restaurants and Petra Zavaleta channels her heritage by practicing the art of barbacoa that she learned from her father in Tepeaca Puebla — Oaxaca’s neighbor — where lamb is king Walking up the driveway reveals a dry-erase-board menu and the silhouette of Zavaleta chopping barbacoa orders with a large heavy cleaver while her husband runs the register Arrive early enough and you’ll see steam still rising from the in-ground pit The cook here is a group affair — it takes multiple people to tackle the pinkish lamb barbacoa cuts and the whole lamb skulls that regulars eagerly dismember to extract the precious tongue (Zavaleta graciously offers to crack the forehead so I can get at the brains.) I take my order and fold it all in a large corn tortilla along with pipicha (a cilantro-like herb) and a dark red salsa And while consomé is a must at any barbacoa stand the dish I’m here for is the mole de panza and tendon that dissolves into bites of gelatinous softness Zavaleta’s nine-hour cook in an underground pit as well as her dense menu of dishes from Tepeaca When Zavaleta started her business in 2016 her son Delfino Rodríguez had the idea to split the word “barbacoa” and combine it with “kush,” the name of an indica strain of marijuana who hoped the niche branding of Barba Kush would help get younger people interested in barbacoa Barba Kush had a brick-and-mortar in the quickly gentrifying Eastside neighborhood of Boyle Heights The pandemic forced its closure a year later serving mole de panza and tacos and quesadillas de barbacoa to a mixed crowd of hipsters down the 5 freeway toward the city of Commerce and possibly one of Southern California’s most famous barbacoa practitioners only in Los Angeles can you eat barbacoa for dinner I have to sell barbacoa all day long,” says barbacoyero Paco Pérez who helped establish the all-day barbacoa restaurant as a viable model Pérez first learned Texcoco-style barbacoa from his uncle but left the business to study and work as an engineer in Spain I moved back to Tijuana to coordinate on an engineering project but found myself more and more drawn back to barbacoa,” says Pérez “I just couldn’t get it out of my system.” He eventually used his engineering skills to design his own oven that closely replicates the underground conditions of pit roasting “It’s the best solution for a business that’s selling barbacoa in a restaurant every day,” says Pérez explaining that the demands of an underground pit would have been unsustainable His oven “produces a much better result than using a regular oven,” he says Pérez and his family now run three branches of Aqui es Texcoco — the original just across the border in Tijuana and the towering fortress-like outlet mall Texcoco is one of the most esteemed cities in Mexico for barbacoa known for its more austere style in which only the pancita is rubbed in adobo whole lambs are seasoned simply with salt and cooked in an underground pit along with pancita Pérez’s menu strays a little to accommodate diverse and it includes antojitos and Tijuana-style quesatacos (tacos with fried cheese) but the pale pink hue of the lamb is evidence of Pérez’s talents as a barbacoyero The Commerce branch of Aqui es Texcoco looks a bit like a remodeled Marie Callender’s and patrons are knocking back boozy pulques curados (cured pulque) with spreads of mixiotes tearing tongue and cheek meat off lamb skulls and rolling tacos of pancita enchilada diners stuff Texcoco-style lamb barbacoa into puffy rounds of pita bread with a cool yogurt and dill salsa a noteworthy accommodation Pérez made to lure in lamb-loving Middle Eastern customers outside the traditional barbacoa hours and tear at the jiggling lamb meat slipping off the bone with a corn tortilla a sharp herb also known as summer cilantro reveling in the tender meat with each bite and each lamb-scented breath in between I pull over in front of a rusty pickup camper parked in front of a home in an East LA residential neighborhood where or adobo-less goat barbacoa that’s seasoned with salt Ramírez’s barbacoa tradition is from Tlacotepec de Benito Juárez a small town to the southeast of Puebla de Zaragoza where Petra Zavalata of Barba Kush comes from but their cooks couldn’t be more different The consomé at Ramirez’s Barbacoa Puebla features garbanzos and a little adobo for flavor; it’s a bright lean goat barbacoa meat that’s cooked in his underground pit Goat barbacoa has become one of my favorites and coming here is a beloved new ritual whenever I find myself with a rare slow weekend After I place my order at the back of the pickup my attention turns toward some local gardeners crouched on the sidewalk over a pile of tacos and a few Modelos they’ve brought from home and we deserve a beer — so do you!” one of them says to me This is Mexican life on weekend mornings in neighborhoods all over the greater Los Angeles area where communities from across Mexico come together to share their food with chatter barely audible above the measured chopping of a cleaver on a cutting board and the creaking of tortilla presses itching to show off the flavors of their hometown over sacred meals that are as slow-paced as the cook itself We take this time to raise a can to the pinche LA hustle and smile defiantly when it doesn’t toast back I wave goodbye to the taquero and send a friendly nod to my fellow weekend revelers faces obscured by steam rising from hot bowls of consomé There’s a barbacoa for every Mexican community in Los Angeles Even if your particular town or state isn’t represented there’s a stand close enough that will happily adopt you and in wooden booths bring us together as Angelenos through food while Mexican Americans like myself connect with our heritage one taco at a time Dishes such as barbacoa are an integral part of the immigrant experience for Mexicans — their just reward for making the perilous journey north to find work Buried in earthen pits underneath Los Angeles — beneath the whole state — it’s there Bill Esparza is a James Beard Award-winning writer and author of LA Mexicano Taxco de Alarcon has a very high level of seismic activity Based on data from the past 55 years and our earthquake archive back to 1900 there are about 135 quakes on average per year in or near Taxco de Alarcon Taxco de Alarcon has had at least 7 quakes above magnitude 6 since 1900 which suggests that larger earthquakes of this size occur infrequently probably on average approximately every 15 to 20 years The quake had a very shallow depth of 3.7 km (2.3 mi) and was not felt (or at least not reported so) Taxco de Alarcon was shaken by 1 quake of magnitude 5.0 2025 at 1.39 pm local time (America/Mexico City GMT -6) The quake had a shallow depth of 61 km (38 mi) and was felt widely in the area.