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.
While the tabaqueros worked, a railroad baron built a fantasy across the river. Henry B. Plant ran his rail line into Tampa and in 1891 opened the Tampa Bay Hotel, a quarter-mile of Moorish Revival brick crowned with silver minarets and onion domes — the most extravagant building in Florida. Plant's railroad and steamships tied Tampa to the world and helped make it a real port; in 1898 the hotel and the city served as a staging point for U.S. troops bound for Cuba in the Spanish-American War. The hotel survives today as the University of Tampa and the Henry B. Plant Museum, its minarets still the city's signature skyline against the bay.
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.
