They called it La Septima. Not on a map. But from the 1890s through to the Depression, if you turned off Nebraska Avenue and walked east along Seventh, you were inside a stretch of Spain that had quietly grown along the Gulf coast. Spanish newspapers on the cafe tables. The smell of saffron and tobacco leaf. And inside the factories, twelve thousand pairs of hands rolling cigars while a man on a wooden platform read aloud from El Diario or the latest chapter of a Galdos novel.
This was Ybor City. And while it is remembered as a Cuban story, and rightly so, it was also one of the largest Spanish enclaves the United States ever had. The men who built it came from Asturias and Galicia, from the green mountains of the Spanish north, and they made their home four thousand miles away on a stretch of Florida scrubland.
Ybor City, The Place
Ybor City sits northeast of downtown Tampa, a tight grid of brick streets a short walk from the Hillsborough River. The neighborhood runs roughly from Nebraska Avenue east to 22nd Street, with Seventh Avenue, the old commercial spine, cutting through the middle.
The architecture is unmistakable. Two and three-storey brick cigar factories with arched windows, wood-frame “casitas” raised on piers, ornate Mediterranean clubhouses with terracotta tile and stucco facades. The TECO Line streetcar still runs the same route the cigar workers once walked. By day, you can still read the old story in the buildings.
How Ybor City Became Spanish
Before Ybor
Before 1885, the land was scrub and palmetto. Tampa was a small Gulf port of fewer than a thousand people, sleepy and provincial, recovering from the disruption of the Civil War.
What changed it was a railroad and a cigar maker. Henry Plant’s South Florida Railroad reached Tampa in 1884, opening the town to the rest of the country. The cigar maker was Vicente Martinez Ybor, a Spaniard born in Valencia who had built his fortune in Havana and then Key West and was looking for a place to escape both labor unrest and the limits of an island.
Tampa’s Board of Trade offered him a five thousand dollar subsidy. In October 1885, Ybor bought forty acres of scrubland and started laying out a factory town. The first brick of what would become the largest cigar manufacturing complex in the world was put down in 1886.
The Spaniards Arrive
The first wave came through Havana. For decades, Cuba had been a destination for young men from Asturias, a mountainous region on Spain’s Bay of Biscay coast, and from Galicia, the Celtic-influenced northwest corner of the peninsula. They went to escape poverty, military conscription, and a rural economy with no future. Many landed in Havana and learned the cigar trade there.
When Ybor moved his factory from Key West to Tampa, the Havana cigar workers followed. The trickle became a steady current after 1886. By 1890 Ybor City had six thousand residents. By 1900 the town had a Spanish-language newspaper, three mutual aid societies, and a working class so politically literate that it terrified Tampa’s old Anglo establishment.
Not all the Spaniards came through Cuba. Many sailed directly from Vigo, Santander, and Gijon to New York or New Orleans, then made their way south. A name in a letter home, a brother already in Ybor, a job waiting at El Reloj or El Principe de Gales. The same chain migration that fed every other ethnic neighborhood in America, only here the chain stretched back to Oviedo and A Coruna.
By the early 1900s the Spanish presence had become institutional. In 1891, manufacturer Ignacio Haya was elected first president of El Centro Espanol, the first Latin club in Ybor City, founded on twenty-five cents a week from each member. In 1902, five hundred and forty-six Asturians broke off to form their own society, El Centro Asturiano, an offshoot of the older Asturian club in Havana.
Ybor at Its Peak
The 1910s and 1920s were Ybor City’s high tide. The cigar industry employed twelve thousand workers across more than two hundred factories. Tampa was producing close to half a billion hand-rolled cigars a year. The neighborhood swelled toward forty thousand residents.
Spanish was the lingua franca of the workshop floor. A Spanish-speaking Sicilian would learn Spanish before English. The factories ran on a peculiar institution called la lectura: a lector, paid directly by the workers themselves rather than the boss, sat on an elevated platform and read aloud all day. Morning was the local Spanish papers. Afternoons were Tolstoy, Hugo, Cervantes, Zola, then political pamphlets and union news.
The lectors were among the highest-paid men in the factory, and they made Ybor’s cigar workers some of the most politically educated working class in America. Cigar rollers discussed Bakunin and Republican politics over their cutters. Strikes were frequent and ideological.
The Spanish Civil War, when it came, hit Ybor City harder than almost any other American community. Tampa had the second-largest pro-Republican Spanish-speaking population in the United States after New York. Twenty-four men from Ybor City volunteered for the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. On May 6, 1937, five thousand Latina women marched down Seventh Avenue in an antifascist demonstration, the largest of its kind in the South.
The community sent tons of food and clothing to Republican Spain, plus twenty thousand cigars, four ambulances, an x-ray machine, and seven thousand dollars in medicine. For an Asturian cigar worker in Tampa, Spain was not abstract. It was a brother in Oviedo or a sister in Pontevedra.
The Change
The end came in two waves. The first was mechanization. By the late 1920s, cigar-making machines could produce in an hour what a roller did in a day. The Depression accelerated everything. Consumers switched to cheap cigarettes. Demand for premium hand-rolled cigars collapsed.
The 1931 cigar workers’ strike was the breaking point. When it failed, the lector tradition went with it. The factory owners had wanted the lectors gone for years. After 1931, the wooden platforms were taken down, the readers dispersed, and a hundred-year tradition ended in a season.
Between 1930 and 1940, a quarter of Ybor’s immigrant white population left Tampa, looking for work in northern cities. World War II finished the cigar trade as a mass employer. The neighborhood emptied. By the 1960s, urban renewal had bulldozed wide swathes of original housing, and an interstate had been cut through the heart of the district.
What survived was the architecture and the institutions that had been built to last. The clubhouses. The Columbia. The factories, converted now into lofts and offices. The historic preservation movement of the 1980s and 1990s saved what was still standing. In 1990 Ybor City was designated a National Historic Landmark District.
The Landmarks of Spanish Ybor City
El Centro Espanol de Tampa, 1526 East Seventh Avenue. Chartered in September 1891, this was the first Latin club in Ybor City. Cigar manufacturer Ignacio Haya served as its first president. The current clubhouse, built in 1912, has a theatre, library, ballroom, and cantina, all behind a buff brick facade. It is one of only a handful of surviving structures in the United States specifically built for Spanish immigrants in the late nineteenth century. National Historic Landmark, 1988.
El Centro Asturiano de Tampa, 1913 North Nebraska Avenue. Founded in 1902 by five hundred and forty-six Asturian immigrants as an offshoot of the Havana club, the Centro Asturiano still operates today. The current building, completed in 1914 by Tampa architect M. Leo Elliott, is a three-storey yellow brick Renaissance Mediterranean palace. Inside is what is believed to be the world’s longest onyx bar, fifty feet of it, gleaming in the cantina. The club still hosts weddings, galas, and a Latin-Asturian restaurant called Latam at the Centro.
Columbia Restaurant, 2117 East Seventh Avenue. Opened in 1905 by Casimiro Hernandez Sr., a young Spaniard who had emigrated to Cuba and then to Tampa. He named his sixty-seat corner cafe after the patriotic song “Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean.” Five generations of the Hernandez family later, it is Florida’s oldest restaurant and the largest Spanish restaurant in the world. The signature 1905 Salad, created here in the 1940s by waiter Tony Noriega, layers Romano cheese, garlic-marinated ham, and Swiss in a single bowl that tells you everything about the neighborhood that invented it.
The Ybor Cigar Factory (El Principe de Gales), 1901 North 13th Street. The original Martinez Ybor factory, opened in 1886. A brick complex that occupies an entire city block, the largest cigar facility in the world at the time. Now mixed-use offices and event space, but the bones are still there.
Jose Marti Park, 13th Street and 8th Avenue. A small triangle of land where the Cuban revolutionary stood in 1893 and spoke to crowds of cigar workers about Cuban independence. The land was deeded to Cuba in 1956 and is technically Cuban sovereign territory. Spaniards in the audience were not always sympathetic to Marti’s politics, but they showed up for him.
Ybor City Museum State Park, 1818 East 9th Avenue. Housed in the old Ferlita Bakery, the museum tells the multi-ethnic story of the neighborhood, with strong material on the Spanish societies, the lectors, and the Spanish Civil War mobilisations.
La Segunda Central Bakery, 2512 North 15th Street. Founded in 1915 by Juan More, a Spaniard who learned baking in Havana. The bakery still produces the long, soft Cuban bread that goes into every proper Cuban sandwich in Tampa. Fourth-generation, family-run. The dough recipe has not changed since 1915.
Where the Ybor Spaniards Came From
The Ybor City Spaniards came overwhelmingly from the north. Asturias first and most numerously: the towns of Oviedo, Gijon, Aviles, and the mining villages of the central valleys. These were people from a region of mountains and meadows and coal pits, Catholic and clannish, with their own dialect and a strong tradition of mutual self-help. The bagpipes, the cider, the dance: an Asturian arriving in Tampa would have recognised it all in the Centro Asturiano cantina on a Sunday afternoon.
Galicia sent the next great wave. From A Coruna, Pontevedra, Lugo, and Ourense came families with names like Fernandez, Garcia, Lopez, and Rodriguez. Galicia was the poorest corner of nineteenth-century Spain, a Celtic-tinged region of small farms and stone villages where emigration to the Americas was a fact of life by 1880. Smaller numbers came from Cantabria, the Basque Country, Andalusia, and Madrid, but the spine of Spanish Ybor was always Asturian and Galician.
They came because someone they knew was already there. A cousin in a casita on 14th Street. A brother on the rolling floor at El Reloj. Two weeks in steerage across the Atlantic, then Havana or Key West or a direct ship to Tampa, and finally a streetcar ride to America’s cigar capital.
Ybor City Today
Walk Seventh Avenue on a weekday morning in 2026 and the neighborhood is quiet. A few coffees on the sidewalk outside Tre Amici. The Columbia open for lunch by eleven. The big cigar factories are now offices and lofts. The casitas, the small workers’ cottages, are increasingly being restored as Airbnbs.
The original Spanish community is gone as a demographic fact. The grandchildren and great-grandchildren of the Asturian and Galician cigar workers live in Carrollwood and South Tampa and Wesley Chapel now. But the institutions are still here, and the membership rolls of the Centro Asturiano still carry the same surnames they did a hundred years ago. The club hosts an Asturian heritage festival each year. The Columbia is still owned by the Hernandez family, fifth generation now.
Ybor at night is something else again. The street is bars and music and a wave of new residents drawn to the brick lofts and the streetcar. The connection to Spain is partial and atmospheric, but it is there, in the language of the menus, the architecture of the clubhouses, the saffron in the paella at Columbia. The story did not end. It changed direction.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why did Spaniards settle in Ybor City?
Spaniards settled in Ybor City because Vicente Martinez Ybor moved his cigar factory from Key West to Tampa in 1885, and the cigar industry’s expansion drew thousands of skilled rollers, many of whom were Asturian and Galician men who had first emigrated to Havana. Word of mouth and chain migration brought wave after wave of Spanish workers and their families to the new neighborhood through the 1880s, 1890s, and early 1900s.
Are Spaniards still in Ybor City today?
The original Spanish residential community largely dispersed after the Great Depression and the collapse of the hand-rolled cigar industry, with descendants moving to other Tampa neighborhoods over the twentieth century. The institutions remain very much alive, however: El Centro Asturiano, El Centro Espanol, and the Columbia Restaurant all operate today, and the Asturian and Galician heritage of Ybor City is celebrated in annual festivals and ongoing cultural programming.
What are the most famous Spanish landmarks in Ybor City?
The most famous Spanish landmarks in Ybor City are the Columbia Restaurant on Seventh Avenue, founded by Asturias-born Casimiro Hernandez Sr. in 1905, El Centro Asturiano de Tampa on North Nebraska Avenue, founded by Asturian immigrants in 1902, and El Centro Espanol de Tampa on East Seventh Avenue, chartered in 1891 and now a National Historic Landmark. La Segunda Central Bakery, the Ybor Cigar Factory, and Jose Marti Park complete the essential set.
Where in Spain did the Ybor City Spaniards come from?
The Spaniards who built Ybor City came overwhelmingly from northern Spain, with Asturias and Galicia by far the largest sending regions. Asturians came mostly from Oviedo, Gijon, Aviles, and the surrounding mining valleys, while Galicians came from A Coruna, Pontevedra, Lugo, and Ourense. Smaller numbers arrived from Cantabria, the Basque Country, Andalusia, and Madrid.
When did Spaniards first arrive in Ybor City?
Spaniards began arriving in Ybor City in 1886, the year Vicente Martinez Ybor’s first cigar factory opened, and continuing through the late 1880s and 1890s. The migration peaked between roughly 1900 and 1920, when Spanish-language newspapers, mutual aid societies, and a fully institutional Spanish community were established. The flow slowed sharply after the 1924 US immigration restrictions and effectively ended with the Great Depression.
If your family’s story passed through Ybor City, or any of the places the Asturian and Galician diaspora made home, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From a stone village in Lugo or a coal valley above Oviedo, to a casita on 14th Street, to wherever you are now.