Engraving-style illustration of Seville's Royal Tobacco Factory with its moat, bridge and arched gateway.

The Royal Tobacco Factory of Seville and its horse-driven snuff mills

Seville was Europe's first centre for making snuff. A writer in Charles Dickens's magazine Household Words, visiting in the 1850s, said the snuff made there was the one that "in Louis the Fourteenth books and in the Spectator and Tatler period, was called The Spanish, par excellence."

For centuries it was the only place in Spain that made snuff, and the factory built for the trade is still there. Since the 1950s it has housed the University of Seville, in rooms where horses once went round in circles grinding tobacco into powder.

Before the palace

Spain's tobacco came in through Seville, which held the crown's monopoly on trade with the Americas by way of its House of Trade, the Casa de Contratación. At first snuff was ground in small mills in workshops scattered around the city. The state then pulled the work together near the Church of San Pedro, partly for hygiene and partly so it could keep an eye on things, and a factory opened there in 1620, in a former women's prison. A new one replaced it in 1687.

A factory the size of a palace

Plans for a far larger factory were drawn up in 1725, and work began in 1728 outside the city walls, near the Puerta de Jerez. It went in fits and starts for decades. Several architects came and went before the Flemish engineer Sebastián Van der Borcht took charge in 1750, and he's usually credited as its main author. Snuff production started in 1758, and an inscription on the drawbridge pillars gives 1770 as the year it was finished. The second edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, published between 1778 and 1783, gives 1756 instead.

The factory had a ditch round it and sentry boxes. At about 185 by 147 metres, it was the second-largest building in Spain when it went up. Only the royal palace-monastery of El Escorial covered more ground.

By 1763 the factory employed a thousand men and two hundred horses, and ran 170 mills.

Inside the mill rooms

Joseph Townsend, an English traveller, left a detailed account of daily life. He toured Spain in 1786 and 1787 and was shown round the factory. His account was summarised in the Encyclopaedia Britannica of 1810, under the plain heading "The principal manufacture of Seville is snuff."

Townsend counted 40 grinding mills, "each consisting of a stone roller, moved by a large horse or mule." He also complained about the harness. Each animal's traces were fastened to an eight-foot beam at an angle of 45 degrees, so that, as the Britannica quotes him, the animal was "consequently losing precisely half his force."

Security was tight. Workers left their cloaks at the door and were searched for snuff on the way out, "yet they sometimes venture to hide it about their persons." Nobody was allowed in with a knife, because "the consequence of a detection might be fatal", and an officer and a guard stood by to arrest anyone caught.

Townsend also described the stockroom. The factory had more than five million pounds of unsold snuff in store, and the account says this caused no concern, since "it will not suffer by age". Each year it sold 1,600,000 pounds of snuff made from the produce of Spain's own colonies.

The red earth

In 1787 Townsend found 1,700 workmen and 100 horses or mules. The Britannica adds that 3,000 men and nearly 400 horses had once worked there, without saying when. Another English traveller, Henry Swinburne, blamed the drop on the directors' habit "of adulterating the tobacco with the red earth of Almazarron." The Britannica says that by the time Townsend visited, the directors "had changed their system".

The earth came from near Almazarrón in Murcia. An 1842 edition of the Britannica describes "a fine red earth without any mixture of sand, called almagri," valued by mirror polishers and "mixed with all the snuff in the royal manufactory of Seville."

Besides Spain's own traditional snuff, Townsend found the factory had lately begun making rappee. That branch alone kept 220 people and 16 mules at work.

Snuff for the clergy, and a story about wine

The Household Words writer called Seville's snuff "the special luxury of the clergy of this priest-haunted city," and his guide told him that snuffing "in the old times, was more common than smoking."

The same writer repeated the story that this was the snuff which, "put as a joke in his wine," killed "the wit and verse-maker Santeuil". We found the story only in that magazine piece, with no evidence offered for it.

Cigars, and the women who rolled them

Cigars came later and slowly overtook snuff. In the early 1800s about 700 men made cigars and a thousand made snuff. Cigar-making stopped in 1811, during the Peninsular War, and restarted in 1813 with a workforce of women, the cigarreras. After 1829 the cigar workforce was entirely female, and at its height in the 1880s it reached around 6,000.

Carmen, the heroine of Prosper Mérimée's novella and Bizet's opera, is a cigarrera in this factory.

The workforce shrank in the twentieth century (3,332 in 1906, about 1,100 in the 1940s). In 1950 the decision was made to move tobacco work to a new plant in Los Remedios, across the river, and the old building was converted for the university between 1954 and 1956. The Los Remedios plant made its last tobacco on the final day of 2007.

On the shelf

Fribourg & Treyer named one of their snuffs Seville. It's scented with neroli and orange flower oil over a natural tobacco base, and sits in the Fribourg & Treyer range. We also stock rappee snuffs.

Sources

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