Meet the Trompo: Mexico's Beloved Spinning Top

September 8, 2026

Before there were video games, before there were phones to keep little hands busy, there was a piece of string, a wooden top, and a patch of dirt or pavement to spin it on. If you grew up in Mexico, or grew up in a Mexican household anywhere in the world, chances are you remember the trompo. Maybe you remember skinned knuckles from winding the string too tight, or the pride of finally getting it to "sleep" (spin so smoothly and quietly it looks still). This one is close to my heart, because we're bringing our own trompo mexicano to Casa de Queta soon, and I wanted to share a little of where this toy really comes from.

Older than you'd think

Spinning tops aren't unique to Mexico. They may be one of the oldest toys in human history. Archaeologists have uncovered clay and wooden tops in Egypt, Greece, and Rome, with some estimates placing the earliest examples as far back as 4000 BCE. The ancient Greeks and Romans played with a version they called the strombos. So long before the trompo became a fixture of a Mexican childhood, cultures across the ancient world were independently discovering the same simple joy: a weighted object, given a spin, dancing on its own point.

How the trompo found its home in Mexico

Here's where the story gets a little tangled, in the best way. Some historians trace the trompo's arrival in Mexico to Spanish colonizers, who brought a version of the toy (sometimes called the peonza) with them to Nueva España. Once here, Indigenous communities quickly made it their own, reshaping it with materials close at hand: wood from guayaba and mezquite trees, cord spun from natural fiber.

Other accounts point further back, suggesting Mesoamerican peoples had their own spinning toys and tops well before contact with Europe. Some even tied to ritual or divinatory practices, used to trace the movement of the sky. The truth is probably layered: pieces of both stories, blending over centuries the way so much of Mexican culture does. What's clear is that by the time the trompo took its familiar shape — a wooden cone with a metal point, or clavo, at the tip — it had become something distinctly Mexican, not just an imported pastime.

A toy for every child, in every plaza

By the late 1800s and into the 20th century, the trompo had become a true fixture of daily life across Mexico. It was inexpensive to make and even more inexpensive to buy, which meant children from every background could play.

Hardware stores stocked trompos alongside nails and rope. Kids gathered in courtyards, streets, and plazas to see whose top spun the longest, whose could knock another out of the ring, or who could pull off the hardest trick of all: landing the spinning trompo in the palm of their hand.

From wood to plastic, and back again

The trompo's story took a modern turn in the 1960s and '70s, when plastic versions hit the Mexican market. In 1963, the brand Plasti Marx introduced plastic trompos with heavy promotion on television, and by the mid-1970s, Duncan brought its own wave of plastic tops into Mexican stores, sparking a new era of trompo championships and trick demonstrations on TV and in the streets.

But the handmade wooden trompo never really left. Artisans across Mexico kept the tradition alive, carving and hand-painting tops the old way. Every year, the Concurso Nacional del Juguete Popular in San Miguel de Allende, Guanajuato, honors the craftspeople keeping toys like the trompo, made by hand, generation after generation.

Why we're bringing one home

That's the tradition we wanted to be part of. Our trompo, launching soon, is made the way Mexican trompos have always been made best: by hand, by artisans who learned the craft from those who came before them. A way to hand a little bit of Mexico to your own kids, or to remember the version of yourself who once stood in a plaza, string in hand, waiting for it to sleep.

Con cariño, Queta

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