Santa Prisca, Taxco — church building
Mario guerrero ledesma 1 · CC BY-SA 3.0

Santa Prisca, Taxco

Templo de Santa Prisca de Taxco

  • 2 min read
  • 18.556° N 99.605° W

Interesting facts

  • From 1758 until 1806 Santa Prisca was the tallest building in Mexico, until the Carmen church in San Luis Potosí overtook it.
  • The church was consecrated on 15 March 1759 by Manuel Antonio Rojo del Río, the Archbishop of Manila.
  • José de la Borda had arrived in Taxco only about 35 years before, yet the archdiocese let him build the parish church entirely to his own taste.
  • According to legend, during a storm in 1751 Saint Prisca appeared above the building site and caught lightning bolts in her hands; a painting inside recalls the story.
  • Miguel Cabrera painted a cycle of 14 scenes from the life of the Virgin for the sacristy, plus the Saint Michael above the side Altar of Souls.
  • Directly above the main door a relief of the Baptism of Christ symbolises the passage into eternal life, and so into the church itself.
  • The retablo makers Isidoro Vicente and Luis de Balbás were adoptive sons of Jerónimo de Balbás, the master who brought the Churrigueresque style to Mexico.
  • The church's facade and towers are carved from rose-tinted stone, which gives the building its warm pinkish glow.
  • Santa Prisca has been on Mexico's tentative list for UNESCO World Heritage since 2001.
  • The oldest document in the parish archive dates from 1598, more than 150 years before the present church was begun.

Why it is worth it

Santa Prisca is the reason the steep silver town of Taxco looks the way it does from any of its hillsides: a pair of stone towers and a tiled dome rising above a tangle of white houses and red roofs. Up close, on the little main square, the church turns out to be one of the purest examples of the Churrigueresque — the late, extravagant Baroque of New Spain, in which columns, garlands and niches multiply until the stone looks more like embroidery than masonry.

It was a single man's gift. José de la Borda, who had made a great fortune in Taxco's silver mines, paid for the church so that his son Manuel could say mass there, and it was raised in a remarkably short time, between 1751 and 1759. The plans were drawn by Cayetano José de Sigüenza and the building was carried out by Diego Durán Berruecos. Because the plot was cramped on its hillside, the Latin-cross plan is unusually narrow, which only exaggerates the height of the towers. The dome is dressed in glazed Talavera tiles, and the stone facade is a stack of Solomonic columns, pilasters, saints and reliefs. The cost is said to have strained even Borda's wealth.

Inside, the effect is overwhelming: nine floor-to-ceiling retablos carved in wood and covered in gold leaf, designed by Isidoro Vicente de Balbás and his brother Luis, with the high altar given to the Immaculate Conception, Saint Prisca and Saint Sebastian, and two more dedicated to the Virgin of Guadalupe and the Virgin of the Rosary. Look for the recurring motifs — scallop shells for baptism, laurel for the triumph of faith, bunches of grapes for the blood of Christ. The church also holds canvases by Miguel Cabrera, the leading painter of eighteenth-century Mexico, including scenes of the martyrdoms of Prisca and Sebastian and an Assumption. Few churches in the Americas were conceived so completely in one campaign, by one patron.

Getting there

The church stands on the east side of Plaza Borda, the main square of Taxco de Alarcón in the state of Guerrero. The nearest airport in a straight line is Toluca's Adolfo López Mateos International (TLC), about 87 km away, but most visitors come from Mexico City International Airport (MEX). Taxco is about 160 km south-west of Mexico City; buses run from the Terminal Central del Sur (Taxqueña) and take roughly two and a half to three and a half hours. Within Taxco the lanes are steep and narrow, and the square is best reached on foot or by local taxi.

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On these lists

The Most Beautiful Places in Mexico 56The Most Beautiful Churches in Mexico 7The Most Beautiful Sacred Places in Mexico 9The Most Beautiful Churches 186The Most Beautiful Sacred Places 623

From the encyclopaedia

The Parroquia de Santa Prisca y San Sebastián, commonly known as the Church of Santa Prisca, is a colonial monument located in the city of Taxco de Alarcón, in the southern state of Guerrero, Mexico, built between 1751 and 1759. It is located on the east side of the main plaza of Taxco.

Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0

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