Danli / Jamastran Valley

Danli is a hill town of about eighty thousand people, some ninety kilometres southeast of Tegucigalpa on the road to Nicaragua, founded in 1667 as San Buenaventura and granted city status in 1843. Its cigar industry is barely sixty years old. It exists because a specific group of people went looking for particular ground after 1959, and found it in the Jamastran valley on the Nicaraguan border: flat, warm, with soils that took Cuban seed. They were explicit about the ambition. They were looking for the new Pinar del Rio.

The names are the same ones that appear in every account of the Cuban exodus. Frank Llaneza planted Cuban seed in Honduras in 1956 and formed Honduras American Tobacco in the mid-1960s at Danli, starting at ten to fifteen thousand cigars a day. Angel Oliva Sr. planted at La Plata in 1960. Julio Eiroa began working the Jamastran valley in 1963 and by 1972 was the largest candela tobacco farmer in the world. When the American embargo cut Punch and Hoyo de Monterrey off from Cuban production, those brands were made in Honduras from 1969, which is why Honduran cigars carried Cuban brand names for a generation.

The valley's reputation is for weight. Jamastran corojo and Cuban-seed filler give the earth, pepper and body that made Camacho Corojo, Punch and Excalibur what they are, and the region has trended fuller as the American market has. The industry has consolidated around a handful of Danli operations: Camacho's Rancho Jamastran, sold to Oettinger Davidoff in 2008 while the Eiroa family kept its fields; Plasencia's Danli plants; Raices Cubanas; JRE's Finca Corojo; and Oscar Valladares, founded in 2012, which grew from one retailer's order into a factory of two hundred people.

The Jamastran valley sits in El Paraiso department near the Nicaraguan border and grows Cuban-seed filler, corojo wrapper and Connecticut-seed shade. Its signature is weight and spice: earth, cayenne and black pepper, particularly in ligero-heavy blends, and the region's corojo is the reference for full-bodied Honduran wrapper. Growers came here in the 1960s explicitly to replicate Cuban conditions, and the valley became the country's most important premium tobacco region as a result. Tobacco is grown alongside maize, coffee and sugarcane on the same municipal ground.

Honduras has almost no lounge culture; the smoking rooms are inside the factories, and the social centre of the trade is the guest salon and the field. Danli's rhythm is agricultural, with tobacco worked alongside maize and coffee, and the town's biggest annual event is the corn festival in late August rather than anything to do with cigars. The workforce is local and largely second or third generation in the trade, and the ownership is a mix of Cuban exile families, Honduran entrepreneurs and, since 2008, a Swiss group. Several factories now run structured visitor programmes, which has turned an industrial town into a modest destination without turning it into a resort.