Menendez Amerino

This is a house born of an exile and a partnership. The Menéndez family made Montecristo and H. Upmann in Cuba; after 1960 they scattered. One of them was already buying leaf from the Bahian Recôncavo from a grower, Mário Amerino da Silva Portugal. At the end of the 1970s the two men set up a factory together.

It stands at São Gonçalo dos Campos, in Bahia — not at Cruz das Almas, where the mata fina it uses is grown. The distinction matters: a place of cultivation is not a place of manufacture.

Everything there is done by hand. The house describes its process as entirely artisanal: each leaf chosen, treated and rolled by skilled women.

Out of this workshop come Alonso Menendez, created in 1980, Dona Flor launched in 1982 — which has its own entry in this atlas — and Alonso Del Patron, out in 2018. It is the same division as between Tabacalera Palma and Aging Room in the Dominican Republic: the factory and its brand both appear here, because they are not the same thing.

Two dates for one founding: 1977 in this atlas and at the house, 1978 in a 2017 report; the entry writes both. The business press of 2012 measured the fall: fifteen thousand cigars a day in the late 1990s, fifteen hundred in 2012, plus four hundred thousand cigarillos a month; four hundred employees once, a hundred and fifty, three years earlier, seventy then, more than 90% women — and still the country's largest factory. In 2026 its vice-president José Henrique Barreto sits on Apcab, the association carrying the designation of origin for the Recôncavo's cigars.

Range Depth

• Alonso Menendez

  Wrapper Bahian mata fina · Strength Medium-Full

  Created in 1980, before Dona Flor itself. It carries the first name of the Cuban family that brought the method.

  Robusto · Toro · Corona

• Alonso Del Patron

  Wrapper Bahian mata fina · Strength Medium

  Out in 2018, forty years after the factory was founded. A house bringing out a new line at that age is rare in Brazil.

  Robusto · Toro

• Dona Flor

  Wrapper Bahian mata fina · Strength Medium

  Launched in 1982 and became the house's brand. It has its own entry in this atlas: Cuban rolling, Brazilian leaf.

  Robusto · Toro · Corona · Lonsdale