Colpuros

Colpuros — Compañía Colombiana de Puros — was born on 5 August 2009 in Piedecuesta, Santander, and it is the house of a lineage: Agustín Correa made tabaco in Zapatoca a hundred and fifty years ago, his son José Correa improved the leaf and the selling, and the grandson, Yorgan Correa Rodríguez, an economist born in 1974, wanted to move from popular tabaco to export puro. He founded the company with Laura Victoria Heredia Portillo, who runs administration and staff, and named his fine line Don José Correa, after his father; Mosqueteros is the line of tabaco and semi-fine.

The workshop is in the Quinta Granada neighbourhood. The rollers, all women heads of household, says the house, were trained by Cubans and Dominicans; the tobacco is Cuban seed grown in Colombia, completed with leaf from Ecuador, Nicaragua, Honduras and the Dominican Republic. The headcount is not published.

In September 2018 the Bucaramanga paper wrote that Colpuros had just placed premium puros in Germany, after four years in which no Piedecuesta house had exported — in a town where two hundred makers, 78% women, feed 6,500 families with tobacco, which weighs 40% of the municipal product. Belgium, Russia, Spain and Sweden were targeted next; the entry does not know what became of it. That the house calls itself the only one certified for export is its own claim; the atlas leaves it to it.

Range Depth

• Don José Correa

  Wrapper Colombian or imported · Strength Medium-Full

  The fine line, named after the father — all by hand, Cuban seed grown in Colombia; placed in Germany in 2018.

• Mosqueteros

  Wrapper Colombian or imported · Strength Medium

  The line of tabaco and semi-fine — Santander's popular cigar, outside the heart of this atlas.