Tampa learned early how to throw a party and chase the future at once. The first Gasparilla festival sailed into the bay in 1904, a civic carnival built around the legend of the pirate Jose Gaspar that still fills the streets every January. A decade later, on the first day of 1914, the aviator Tony Jannus flew the world's first scheduled commercial airline flight across the bay from St. Petersburg to Tampa — the beginning of an entire industry, launched over Tampa's water.
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.
