The Cámara Nicaragüense de Tabacaleros (Nicaragua Tobacco Chamber) has issued a press release stating that the Puro Sabor Nicaraguan Cigar Festival for 2022 has been cancelled.
The announcement cites public health (the Covid-19 pandemic) as the reason they have decided to cancel. Claudio Sgroi (President of the Nicaraguan Chamber of Tobacco) commented that “The health of our collaborators and visitors is more important than the direct contact event”.
However, he did not mention if in 2022 they will offer the “virtual events” that Puro Sabor put on through 2021 by way of on line seminars.
This will be the third time in recent years that the popular Puro Sabor event has been cancelled. The first time was in 2019 after the civil unrest in Nicaragua.
They were able to hold the 2020 edition of the festival before the Covid-19 pandemic shut everything down. The same pandemic was the cause of this year’s 2021 festival having to be cancelled. The 2022 festival would have been the 9th Puro Sabor event.
Each year, in January of February, Nicaragua usually joins Cuba (Festival del Habano) and Dominican Republic (ProCigar) in showcasing the three countries cigars.
It has been announced that Cuba’s Habano festival will go ahead and is scheduled for February 21st to the 25th.
Meanwhile, The Dominican Republic ProCigar event in Santiago de los Caballeros will run from February 22nd to February 25th.
The last Nicaraguan Cigar Festival in 2020 started in Managua on the 25th of January before moving to Granada and finishing up in Estelí (Nicaragua’s largest cigar-producing city and one of the biggest in the world).
Cigar lovers from far and wide make this a truly international event by flying in to participate in the largest cigar and tobacco celebration in Nicaragua. The Nicaraguan Chamber of Tobacco said that the 2020 Puro Sabor Festival attracted about 120 attendees from 21 countries, including; Germany, Australia, Sweden and South Africa.
