Seville

Seville manufactured tobacco before anywhere else in Europe. As the port through which American cargo legally entered Spain, it received the leaf, and by 1620 a works had opened in the San Pedro district, on the site of a former women's prison. When the crown made tobacco a royal monopoly in the 1630s, the city became the industrial centre of that monopoly. What began as snuff milling, done with horse-driven stones, shifted over the eighteenth century towards the rolled cigar, and the vocabulary that came with it travelled outward to Havana, Manila and eventually to every factory that calls its rolling floor a galera.

The building matched the ambition. Ignacio Sala drew up plans in 1725, construction began in 1728 outside the city walls, and Sebastian Van der Borcht took charge from 1750. Production started in 1758 and the works were finished in 1770. At 185 by 147 metres, ringed by a moat with sentry boxes to guard a commodity worth more than its weight in coin, it was the second-largest building in Spain after El Escorial. In 1763 it ran 170 mills with two hundred horses and about a thousand men.

Then the workforce changed sex. The cigar section closed in 1811 during the Peninsular War and reopened in 1813 with women at the benches; by 1829 the cigar rooms were entirely female. At their peak in the 1880s some six thousand cigarreras worked in the building, many with infants beside them. Prosper Merimee made one of them the heroine of Carmen in 1845, and Bizet set the first act of his 1875 opera at the factory gate, which is why a Spanish state tobacco works is one of the most recognizable industrial buildings in the world.

Seville grew nothing. Its significance is entirely industrial: it was the point at which American leaf, brought across the Atlantic under royal licence, was turned into a manufactured product on a scale nobody had attempted before. The early output was snuff, ground in horse mills, with cigars taking over through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The organisational model developed here, a single vast state factory with graded workrooms and strict accounting of every leaf, was the template later reproduced in Havana and Manila.

The cigarreras were the largest concentration of women wage workers in nineteenth-century Spain, and they behaved like it: strikes are recorded in 1838, 1842 and 1885. They were searched at the gate on the way out, since the leaf they handled was crown property, and they brought babies into the workrooms in cradles and baskets, a detail noted by visitors well into the twentieth century. Their independence was what made Carmen legible to foreign audiences as a type rather than an invention. In Seville itself the cigarrera remained a figure of civic pride long after the last cigar left the building.