The long and winding road snaking from Managua to Esteli would be perfect for breaking in a shiny vehicle with some major-league horsepower under the hood.

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But on a rainy winter afternoon, even this like-new SUV is forced to crawl along — stuck behind yet another exhaust-belching school bus with a village’s worth of luggage strapped to its roof. It’d be enough to make even Steve McQueen lose his cool, but Steve Saka and Marvin Samel seem relatively unperturbed as they puff away at their cigars.

“When I first started coming here 15 years ago,” says Saka, president of Drew Estate, the cigar company founded by Samel and his business partner, Jonathan Drew, in 1995, “men with AK-47s would stop people in the road.”

In light of that, who wouldn’t be happy dealing with just a little traffic?

The two-lane straightens out, and Saka takes the opportunity to throw the whining SUV into third and power around the bus. They’re approaching Esteli, a low and sprawling town in Nicaragua’s north country, considered one of the capitals of the cigar-making world. Men on horseback clop along the rough roads, sharing space with clattering trucks and rusty compacts with blaring speakers bolted to their roofs — the buildings’ bright stucco still bearing the bullet pocks of the country’s extended civil war.

Saka turns off the road a few miles from their factory on the outskirts of town. A mere aluminum shell some eight months ago, the huge facility now produces 70,000 cigars a day, including their Liga Privada and Château Real lines, both of which have become immensely popular among a younger demographic of cigar smokers. In any other town, a factory of that immensity would be remarkable but at least five major cigar makers occupy their own compounds within a 15-minute drive of the town center, producing a major portion of Nicaragua’s 55 million–plus sticks exported annually to the United States.

Esteli’s heart may be the tall white church looming over the bustle of the town square, but its soul is in the soil, rich and thick as it crumbles between your fingers. Slip a chunk in your mouth and taste the clay. It’s the reason why Nicaraguan tobacco is prized by cigar makers and smoke connoisseurs.

“This is tobacco grown near here,” says Nestor Plasencia Jr., fifth-generation scion of one of the country’s best-known cigar brands, as he offers up a handful of dry leaves from a bin deep in his factory. “Smell that? This is very strong; that means it’s heavy soil.”

The cigar tradition in Nicaragua goes back nearly 50 years. It never endured the same degree of mania that swept the Dominican Republic during the cigar boom of the mid-’90s, and its soil, rich in nutrients — thanks to omnipresent volcanic activity — hasn’t undergone the depletion that has affected other nations’ crop yields.

So cigar companies here (nobody seems quite sure how many outfits are rolling sticks, but most estimates range between 20 and 30), are in it for the long haul. Although they’ve moved their tobacco stockpiles to neighboring Honduras during periods of instability, the soil — whether in Esteli, Condega or Jalapa Valley, the prime tobacco-growing areas — is simply too good, too unique, for them to stay away. “We take tobacco from different regions so we don’t have to change the blends,” says Plasencia, handing over three of his newest creations, the Plasencia Reserva Organica, an organic-tobacco stick, meant to evoke the rustic and clean cigars of centuries past. “Right now the market is so sophisticated. . . . you have to give the customer a good cigar.”

Around him, workers start yet another day in what some have termed the “cathedral of cigars.” Narrow stained-glass windows front the building, and the greenery-filled courtyard at the center gives the enterprise an almost monastic air, as rolling tobacco from all three of the country’s prime growing areas begins.

The younger Plasencia, like his famous father, knows all too well the work required to reach this point. Living in Nicaragua over the past several decades, the Plasencias needed the strength to start over after the Sandinistas took everything in the course of the revolution. “We’d been confiscated by the government twice — first in Cuba, then here,” he says. “My father was a hard worker, and wise. And right now we’re in a good position for cigar production and tobacco growing.”

Nicaragua’s stronger tobacco has dovetailed nicely with the current trends in cigar smoking. “People are looking for more and more flavor,” says Nick Perdomo Jr., head of nearby Tabacalera Perdomo. “We’re Cuban, and even my father said the best tobacco in the world, bar none, is from Nicaragua.” For someone whose grandfather once rolled at Cuba’s famous H. Upmann factory, that constitutes a major statement of faith — one shared by his colleagues. The filler of his new Perdomo Habano combines Cuban-seed tobaccos from the Esteli, Condega and Jalapa regions.

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