Festival del Habano

Held each February in Havana, the Festival del Habano brings together cigar enthusiasts, industry experts and tobacco professionals from around the world for a week dedicated to the internationally celebrated Cuban cigar. The festival includes tours of some of Havana's oldest working cigar factories alongside visits to the tobacco-growing farms responsible for the leaf itself, giving attendees a genuine, hands-on understanding of the entire production process from field to finished cigar.

Beyond the cigars themselves, the festival's programme extends into food and drink in a genuinely significant way: gala dinners at Havana's lavish 'protocol houses', official venues normally reserved for state entertaining, pair cigars with roast pig, coffee and chocolate milk spiked with Cuban rum, giving the festival's culinary side a scale and formality that matches its cigar-focused programming. Cigar tastings, seminars and the prestigious closing gala, where the year's most significant Habanos releases are unveiled, round out a week widely considered essential for serious cigar collectors.

Given how closely cigars, rum and coffee are woven into Cuban identity more broadly, the Festival del Habano offers visitors a distinctly Cuban way to explore food and drink culture — filtered through the country's most globally recognised export, rather than through a conventional tasting-menu format.