Museo Guillermo Spratling, Taxco

The Museo Guillermo Spratling in Taxco is named for William Spratling, an American-born architect and designer who arrived in Taxco in the late 1920s and founded a silversmithing workshop in 1931 that revived the town's silver trade and trained a generation of local artisans, reshaping Taxco's economy around silver craftsmanship that continues today. Rather than displaying his silver designs, the museum houses Spratling's personal collection of pre-Hispanic artifacts, assembled over decades from cultures across western and central Mexico, including ceramics, carved jade and stone figures, and funerary objects. The collection is organized thematically by material and cultural origin across the museum's compact galleries, with an emphasis on the craftsmanship of the pre-Hispanic objects that inspired Spratling's own silver designs, drawing a direct line between ancient Mexican artistry and Taxco's modern silver industry. The museum building itself is a mid-20th-century structure purpose-built to house the collection following Spratling's death in 1967, when his artifacts were donated to the Mexican state, and its display cases and lighting have been periodically updated while the core exhibit layout has remained stable since the museum's founding. The museum sits within Taxco's compact colonial center, a short walk from Santa Prisca and Casa Borda, making it easy to combine with the town's other historic sites.