Seville: Europe's First Cigar City

All roads for tobacco into Europe led first through Seville. The Andalusian port city held the monopoly on trade with the New World — and in doing so became the first cigar city on the continent.

From Remedy to Court Fashion

In the sixteenth century, tobacco reached Europe as a curiosity and supposed medicinal herb. Around 1560, the French ambassador Jean Nicot sent tobacco to the court in Paris — his name lives on in the botanical genus Nicotiana and in the word nicotine. At court, tobacco was rarely smoked at first: it was snuffed. Finely ground snuff was considered elegant, and the Spanish Crown organised production and trade early as a state monopoly.

The Royal Tobacco Factory

The centrepiece of that monopoly arose in Seville. Construction of the Real Fábrica de Tabacos began in 1728; production started in 1758, and the building was complete around 1770 — one of the largest industrial structures of the eighteenth century and, after the Escorial, the second-largest historic building in Spain. At first, mills ground snuff tobacco there; as the cigar came into fashion, part of the operation was converted to rolling. Today the building houses the University of Seville — anyone who walks its corridors walks through the oldest surviving tobacco factory in Europe.

The Cigarreras

By the nineteenth century, cigar rolling in Seville had become women’s work; at the peak in the 1880s, some 6,000 women rolled cigars there — the forerunners of the Cuban torcedores. The Cigarreras became figures of the city’s history and of world literature: Prosper Mérimée’s novella Carmen (1845) and Bizet’s opera of the same name (1875) made one of them immortal.

The Road into the Industrial Century

From Spain and Portugal the cigar spread to courts and trading cities, and by the nineteenth century manufactories had appeared well beyond the Iberian Peninsula. The cigar moved from courtly luxury to bourgeois pleasure. Yet the new measure of all things was already growing on the far side of the Atlantic — in Cuba.