Tampa Audio Tours

Ybor City was once the cigar capital of the world. In the 1880s, Vincente Martinez-Ybor moved his cigar manufacturing operation from Key West to this patch of flat land east of downtown Tampa, and the community that grew around the factories -- Cuban, Spanish, Italian -- created a neighbourhood with its own social clubs, newspapers and mutual aid societies. The brick streets and terracotta-tiled buildings are still there, and on weekend nights the bars and music venues of 7th Avenue fill with a crowd that has nothing to do with cigars but owes its neighbourhood to them.

Tampa's waterfront has undergone the kind of transformation that most mid-sized American cities attempt and few pull off.

The Tampa Riverwalk runs 4.5 kilometres along the Hillsborough River from the Armature Works (a converted 1910 streetcar maintenance building, now a food hall) through downtown and past the convention centre to the Channel District. Across the bay, the St. Pete Pier in St. Petersburg is a quick drive and offers some of the best sunsets on the Gulf Coast. The Cuban sandwich, which Tampa insists it invented and Miami merely popularised, is made on Cuban bread (baked with a palmetto frond for that chewy crust) with roast pork, ham, Swiss cheese, pickles and mustard -- and it is significantly better here than anywhere else.