In 2009, while living in Guatemala, every time I mentioned being a jeweler in conversations, I often heard the question: "Hey, have you been to Taxco?"”

I made it there many years later, and I want to show you why this place is essentially a jeweler’s paradise.

Nested among mountains, it is a little colonial town and a very old important mining center filled with history, tradition, handmade jewelry and lapidary shops.

Traveling 9500 km to this particular place for stones might seem like a stretch when I could easily purchase them online and have them delivered to my doorstep. Don't get me wrong—I've done that, and it's what initially made me reconsider.

One of the benefits of having your own business is you can choose who you work with, I can tell you the name of the person selling me these stones, I have his phone number, I can get information of where they were mined from and where they were cut. It’s a community.

A group of people who support each other and works very hard. I prefer that our money stays within this community and also it helps me sleep better at night.

This is the reason most of my pieces are one of a kind as well, this is not a factory, this is alive and moving, varying from the rough materials that are found and whatever is available there and now, which maybe won’t be there next year. This aligns with the way I prefer to work—no fixed collections with molds, but rather something that changes and evolves.

I source stones for the whole year, this took me 3 days, below you can find a small visual summary, which includes yours truly sitting on a bucket for God knows how many hours, the real behind-the-scenes—seeing hundreds of stones one by one while sliding the bucket, ha! I could never be an influencer, the sheer pleasure of turning into a child hunting for treasure again for me, it’s impossible to stage :)

This is my fourth time there, the plan is to go every year and a half and I admit is one of my happy places, and I am grateful, not only of finding suppliers but also some friends here.