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Tampa is Cigar City — a Fort Brooke frontier post that immigrant tabaqueros turned into the cigar capital of the world, crowned with silver minarets and guarded, once a year, by pirates. Our Tampa designs gather that into wearable form. Wear Cigar City. Cigar City. Rolled by hand since 1885.
What's with Cigar City? In 1885 a Spanish-born cigar manufacturer named Vicente Martinez Ybor moved his operation to a stretch of scrub northeast of downtown Tampa and built a town around it — block after block of brick cigar factories and little wooden casitas for the workers. Cuban, Spanish, and Italian immigrants poured in to roll cigars by hand, and within twenty years Tampa was turning out hundreds of millions of them a year, more than anywhere on earth. They called it the Cigar Capital of the World, and Tampa has called itself Cigar City ever since. The brick factories still stand in Ybor; the story they tell is about immigrants and craft, not just tobacco.
Why People Visit Tampa
Tampa draws travelers who want real heritage with Gulf sunshine — the brick-and-cigar history of Ybor's Latin Quarter, the fairy-tale minarets of Plant's hotel, the bay and the Riverwalk, and a pirate festival unlike anywhere else. It is a city that wears its immigrant, working-waterfront story openly, an easy gateway to the Gulf beaches just across the bay.
