Finca Tabaquera El Sitio

El Sitio is not first of all a brand: it is a field. The finca, at La Lomada in Breña Alta, farms more than twenty-five thousand square metres, five thousand of them under cloth for the wrapper alone — the cultivo bajo telón, which no other holding in the archipelago practises.

Antonio González, who runs it, has grown tobacco since he was eleven. The stance is the most radical in the Canaries: the leaf is entirely palmera, wrapper included, where most so-called Canary cigars are rolled with imported American tobacco. The finca selects local seeds, inherited from the plantations of the eighteenth century.

Opened in 2005, it can be visited Monday to Friday. There the plant can be followed from the field to the rolling table, by way of the drying barn and fermentation — a sequence no other place in the archipelago shows in one piece.

Range Depth

• El Sitio Robusto

  Wrapper Palmera grown under cloth · Strength Medium

  The cigar that made the finca known: wholly palmero, wrapper included, which is rare in the Canaries. It is the format on which the finca lets itself be judged.

  Robusto

• El Sitio Corona

  Wrapper Palmera grown under cloth · Strength Medium

  The house's long formats, on the same wholly island-grown tobacco. The wrapper comes from the five thousand square metres farmed under telones.

  Corona · Nº 1

• El Sitio Pirámides

  Wrapper Palmera grown under cloth · Strength Medium

  The figurado of the catalogue. The finca produces its own wrapper and its own binder, which allows shapes few Canary workshops attempt.

  Pirámide