Nicaragua's cigar capital and mural city — where the Revolution is still painted on walls and tobacco is still hand-rolled
Estelí in northern Nicaragua is the country's premium cigar-producing city, a cool highland valley at 844m where the tobacco grown in the surrounding fertile plains is hand-rolled into Nicaraguan premium cigars that command global respect. The city is covered in massive political murals from the Sandinista revolution — commissioned from the 1970s onward, many still vivid — that make the centro histórico an outdoor gallery of Latin American political art. Estelí attracts a particular type of traveller: NGO workers, political-history enthusiasts, and cigar connoisseurs who come to tour the gran…
Estelí was a key battleground of the Sandinista Revolution — the city was liberated from Somoza's National Guard in 1978 and suffered significant casualties and destruction. The revolutionary murals that cover its walls were painted as political art and propaganda from that period onward. The city rebuilt rapidly under the Sandinista government (1979–90) and its tobacco industry, established by Cuban exiles who brought their expertise after the Cuban Revolution, became the engine of the modern economy.