Last Cigarette Factory in Seville, Home of Carmen, Closes

Carmen, the sultry cigarette-maker from Seville, and her kind will never again be seen after a multinational yesterday pulled the plug on the city's last tobacco factory.

The thousands of feisty, independent-spirited female cigarette-rollers - the cigarreras - employed by Seville's factories in the 19th century inspired French composer Georges Bizet to write an opera based on one, Carmen.

The last of these factories is due to be closed within two years by Altadis, the Franco-Spanish multinational. It said a decline in sales of black tobacco meant it had to lay off the 200 workers left there.

Seville became the centre of the tobacco trade in the 17th century after Spaniards and others found the indigenous Americans smoking the plant. In 1614 King Philip III decreed that all tobacco grown in the Spanish new world should be shipped to Seville. Cigarettes were reputedly invented by beggars using tobacco from cigar stubs.

The world's biggest tobacco factory, the Royal Factory of Seville, was built in 1758 and not abandoned until the 1950s when it became home to the city's university.

In Bizet's day more than 3,000 cigarreras, women with their own income and status, would sit in a room hand-rolling cigarettes. "The cigarreras, many of whom are great beauties, form a class by themselves, and unhappily are not noted for their chastity," the 19th-century writer Howe Downes reported.