For visitors looking for the best that Florida can offer, our luxury Tampa hotels are a sumptuous mix of innovation with tradition. You’ll have access to the latest technologies to keep you connected to the world at large, but also experience our unique hospitality that will leave you refreshed. We have carefully selected our hotels for their consistency in meeting high standards of excellence in both service and style. You will enjoy being pampered in an atmosphere that is both local and international, reflecting the best of contemporary tastes. Tampa has a very rich blend of cultures, with a long and fascinating history, and our hotels are a splendid vantage point from which to experience this exciting city.
There are always exciting things to do here, every day of the week, and visitors of all ages will be pleased with what Tampa has to offer. From museums to nightclubs, there is a wide array of choices. For cigar lovers, there is Ybor City, home to some of the oldest factories in the United States. The rolling industry here has faded in the past years, but there are still a number of excellent tobacco shops, and you can buy hand-rolled cigars at street fairs and other public events. The city’s connection to the cigar speaks to its diversity, and Ybor City in Tampa has a significant Afro-Cuban population. It grew at the end of the 19th century with the rise of tobacco here, and the history of this is fascinating and speaks to contemporary Tampa. Today this area is still largely composed of Americans with Cuban, Italian, and Spanish lineage.
Cigars in Tampa have a way of linking the present to the past, and in the tobacco leaf one can trace the history of human cultures in the process of migration. There is a fascinating nostalgia here for the earlier days, although the earlier days suggest enormously difficult labor. The workers in cigar factories would spend hours meticulously rolling the leaves together, in hot warehouses and on hard wooden chairs. At the same time, the workers were also read to during their workday, and this suggests an attempt to maintain and improve the interior intellectual life. It’s a complicated past, and one certainly worth exploring while you’re here, and you don’t have to light a cigar to enjoy the myths and histories.
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