La Aurora Factory
The oldest cigar factory in the Dominican Republic, begun in 1903 near Santiago and still operated by the Leon family.
La Aurora's factory began in 1903 in the Guazumal district outside Santiago, where the eighteen-year-old Eduardo Leon Jimenes started rolling cigars, and moved into Santiago as the business grew. It is the oldest cigar manufacturing operation in the Dominican Republic and predates the country's emergence as the world's largest exporter of handmade cigars by some seventy years. The operation has remained in family hands throughout.
The plant produces the full La Aurora range, including the Preferidos double figurados that require specialised rollers, and manufactures for other brands under contract. It has been a fixture of the Procigar association's annual factory tour programme, and is one of the more accessible large Dominican factories for visitors. Figurado rolling of that kind requires longer training than standard parejo shapes, and relatively few factories maintain the capability.
Ownership stayed within the Leon Jimenes group for most of the twentieth century before Guillermo Leon acquired the cigar business outright and separated it from the wider family holding. The factory continues to work with Cameroon and Dominican-grown wrappers, both long-standing La Aurora signatures. The separation of the cigar business from the wider family group left it as a stand-alone company for the first time in its history.