A Celebration Of Nicaraguan Cigars
Travel can be marketed in many ways: spiritual pilgrimages, ecotourism, wellness retreats. For dedicated cigar lovers, Puro Sabor checks all those boxes and probably even a few more. It’s Nicaragua’s annual cigar festival and really, it’s in a travel classification of its own.
If you’ve ever felt the desire to get closer to your favorite Nicaraguan brands, there’s no greater opportunity to do so than at Puro Sabor. It’s a weeklong excursion into the hobby where you can tour tobacco farms, visit cigar factories and meet the people who produce some of the most prestigious cigars to come out of Nicaragua, including our 2025 Cigar of the Year, the Padrón 60th Anniversary Perfecto. Every tour offers firsthand insight into the cigarmaking process, from seedbeds and soil to rolling tables and aging rooms. The basic setup of the festival is simple: field and factory trips by day and cigar-smoking dinners at night where everyone at the festival convenes, including the cigarmakers themselves.
Having done the tour since the beginning, we can say from experience that getting there is a bit of a trek. Once you fly into the capital city of Managua, the festival begins in the colonial city of Granada, about a one-hour drive away. That’s the easy part. Getting from Managua to Estelí, however, is a two-to-three-hour bus ride up the Pan American highway, and that’s without traffic. Estelí was once an easy-access town. No longer, and you can thank the cigar industry for that. Nicaragua is now the leading exporter of handmade cigars to the United States—more than 250 million per year—and that means jobs, which of course results in traffic.
But what worthwhile journey doesn’t require a bit of adversity? This is one of the few times, if not the only time of year, when laymen can visit their company of choice and observe the intricacies of each operation. The lineup of participants included: Aganorsa Leaf, A.J. Fernandez, Drew Estate, Joya de Nicaragua, Karen Berger, My Father Cigars, NACSA, Nica Sueño (RoMa Craft Tobac), Oliva Cigar Co., Padrón Cigars, Perdomo, PENSA (J.C. Newman), Plasencia Cigars, Rocky Patel Premium Cigars, STG Estelí (CAO, Cohiba), Victor Calvo and Villiger Cigars. It also included a tour of A.S.P. Enterprises, a tobacco-growing operation owned by David Perez, as well as packaging manufacturers Cigar Box Factory and Cigar Rings.
More than 1,000 guests from several countries came this year, and many of them were consumers hoping to get a more intimate look at cigar culture. Should you decide to go in 2027, we offer the same practical advice we give to prospective visitors every year: bring a big suitcase. From the moment you register, the Festival plies you with cigars. And rum too. Flor de Caña, Nicaragua’s national spirit, is a large sponsor of the event and you’ll not only be sipping this spirit alongside every cigar, you’ll have some to bring home as a keepsake of your time in tobacco country and a reminder to come back again the following year.
