Tampa Hotels

Pre 20th Century History
Present day Tampa became a trendy place to settle down as early as 3000 BC (the late Archaic period), according to the evidence of shell middens in the area. The largest Indian group in the region prior to the arrival of the Spanish in the 16th century was the 20,000-strong Calusa. The Calusa made their lack of affection for their first European visitors abundantly clear in 1513 when one Juan Ponce de León ran into the Atlantic coast of Florida and then, after sailing around the peninsula, tried to come ashore in Tampa Bay only to be repelled by its Indian occupants. Ponce de León was a persistent fellow, however, and returned in 1521 with settlers and livestock, only to die from a Calusa-inflicted poison arrow wound. Eighteen years later another Spaniard, Hernando de Soto, arrived and noted an Indian fishing village on the bay but again failed to make any inroads. The Spanish finally succeeded in establishing a base on the east coast of Florida in 1565 - they called it St Augustine and it constituted America's first permanent European settlement. War dominated Florida for the next two centuries with armed conflicts continually breaking out between the Spanish, French and British. The British seizure of Spanish-controlled Havana in 1761, during the Seven Years War, led to the First Treaty of Paris, by which Spain agreed to swap Florida for Cuba. But a mere 20 years later, the Second Treaty of Paris, which was negotiated at the end of the seven-year American Revolution, saw the British return Florida to Spain, albeit with a new and burgeoning social structure. The US undertook an aggressive expansion south into Florida via the War of 1812 and five years later provoked one of the state's main Indian tribes, the Seminole, into the First Seminole War. The Second Seminole War began in 1835 and ended seven years later with the displacement of the surviving Indians to the Everglades. The end of this battle also paved the way for Florida to be admitted into the Union in 1845, though the US Civil War soon put an end to the Confederacy. In the meantime the small settlement of Tampa had risen, starting with the establishment of Fort Brooke in 1824 a mere two months after the arrival of the first American settler. Southwest Florida opened up to significant development at the end of the 19th century, when railroad magnate Henry B Plant built a railway line that connected the region with the state's northeast and also established a steamship line between Tampa and Havana.

Modern History
Speaking of Cuba, in 1886 Vicénte Martínez Ybor and Igancio Haya relocated their Cuban cigar-making enterprise from Key West to Ybor City, a district in Tampa's northeast, inaugurating Tampa's 20th-century dominance of domestic cigar manufacture. Their business decision, arrived at after Key West union organizers got too effective at their jobs, led to an influx of other cigar makers and Ybor City became the cigar capital of America over the first half of the 20th century. Tampa also benefited in the 1890s from the discovery nearby of valuable phosphates which were exported through the city's growing port, and the city was used as a military staging area for US troops to Havana during the Spanish-American War. Tampa's domination of the domestic cigarillo industry finally came to an end in 1959 when Fidel Castro's revolution sparked a US embargo on Cuban products, sending Ybor City and the rest of Tampa into a 30-year decline.

Recent History
The socio-economic rot stopped in the early 1990s, after Ybor City was officially designated a national historic district. It underwent a transformation into the gentrified residential area and hip entertainment centre it is today. What's been good for Ybor City has also been good for the rest of Tampa, which has benefited greatly from the extensive rejuvenation of its old district, as well as from the establishment of a swag of excellent museums, fun-loving Busch Gardens and a swelling tourist presence on the nearby Gulf-coast beaches.