What turned the frontier town into a city was Ybor City. Martinez Ybor, his partner Eduardo Manrara, rival manufacturer Ignacio Haya, and the engineer Gavino Gutierrez laid out a planned cigar town that quickly became one of the most distinctive immigrant communities in the South. The tabaqueros rolled at long benches while a lector read aloud from newspapers and novels to the whole gallery. Cuban, Spanish, Sicilian, and Afro-Cuban families built mutual-aid clubs — El Centro Espanol, the Centro Asturiano — that ran their own clinics and ballrooms. The Cuban sandwich and cafe con leche are Ybor inventions. At its peak Ybor and neighboring West Tampa held scores of brick factories employing thousands of rollers. It was, and is, a true Latin Quarter.
People had lived around the bay for thousands of years before any of that. The Tocobaga fished and built shell mounds along these shores, and Spanish expeditions — Narvaez in 1528, Hernando de Soto near the bay in 1539 — passed through with consequences that fell hard on Native nations. Permanent settlement came with the U.S. Army: Fort Brooke was planted at the mouth of the Hillsborough River in 1824, a frontier post that anchored the village that incorporated as Tampa in 1855.
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.
