The Cigar Capital of the World: The Ybor City Historic District in Tampa Florida
With the turn of the twentieth century no city in the United States of America was as well-known for its cigars as that of Ybor City inside Tampa, Florida. So famous was this city that it earned the label as the “Cigar Capital of the World” for a period of time. As it currently stands, Ybor City has been preserved as a historic district of some 950 buildings that existed during its peak as the central of the cigar world.
Ybor City is also unique in how it blended together a mix of cultures from European, Asian, and Cuban immigrants that were drawn there due to the cigar industry that reigned from the late nineteenth to early twentieth centuries. The first stirrings of trouble in Cuba in the latter part of the nineteenth century, combined with increased American tariffs on imported cigars, lead to a number of Cuban cigar companies to build factories within the borders of the United States to secure their businesses.
Ybor City itself owes its name to one of these cigar titans, Vicente Martínez e Ybor. Born in Valencia, Spain, he lived in Cuba for 15 years while it was still a Spanish Colony. He is best known for founding the “Prince of Wales” brand of cigars. Unfortunately an outspoken proponent of Cuba independence, he was exiled from Spanish Cuba. By the late 1960’s he moved his…
