Tabacalera Filipina (La Flor de la Isabela)

The Compania General de Tabacos de Filipinas was formed in 1881 by Antonio Lopez y Lopez to work the Spanish colonial tobacco monopoly in the Philippines, and its La Flor de la Isabela factory followed in Manila in 1887. Contemporary accounts described it as the largest and most advanced tobacco and cigar factory in the world at the time, drawing leaf from the Cagayan and Isabela valleys in northern Luzon.

Philippine tobacco predates the company by centuries: Cuban seed is recorded as having arrived on a Spanish galleon in the late sixteenth century, and Manila cigars were an established trade good in Asian and European markets long before the monopoly was formalised. Tabacalera was the industrial expression of that trade. Philippine cigars were traded widely in Europe and the Americas under the Spanish colonial system, and Manila was for a period a serious rival to Havana in export volume.

The Spanish parent sold the tobacco business to a Filipino group in the twentieth century, and the operation trades today as Tabacalera Incorporada, producing 1881, Flor Fina, Don Juan Urquijo and Alhambra lines by hand in Manila. It is among the oldest continuously operating cigar companies anywhere. Output is small by modern standards, and the company is significant chiefly as a surviving link to the colonial monopoly system rather than as a volume producer.