Don Collins

Don Collins is the brand of a workshop-shop in Old San Juan, on Calle del Cristo, where cigars can be seen rolled from the street. Puerto Rico Tobacco Corporation has made it since 1991 — the date this atlas retains, and the only one the house gives that needs no discussion.

For the house tells more. It says it descends from a Porto Rico Leaf Company supposedly chartered by Spain around 1506, and presents itself as the oldest cigar factory in the Caribbean; this atlas attributes that claim to the one making it, and found it nowhere else. What is established is more modest and more solid: in 1899, the American Tobacco Company had the Porto Rican-American Tobacco Company organised, taking over Rucabado y Portela, a cigar and cigarette maker on the island — it is written in the 1911 ruling by which the United States Supreme Court broke up the trust. Today's Puerto Rico Tobacco Corporation says it is the heir of that company; the link is plausible, and this atlas leaves it in the conditional.

Puerto Rico was a major tobacco country until the 1920s. For hand-rolling, only this workshop remains, and this atlas opens the island for it — a rolling country documented by its own shopfront, which the entry says rather than hides.

Range Depth

• Don Collins

  Wrapper Puerto Rican, the house says · Strength Medium

  Hand-rolled in the Calle del Cristo workshop since 1991; pesticide-free Puerto Rican tobacco, the house claims.