Royal Tobacco Factory of Seville

The Royal Tobacco Factory of Seville is defined by a stone moat that rings its perimeter, separating the massive eighteenth-century structure from the city around it. Built between seventeen twenty-eight and seventeen seventy-one, this rectangular complex served as the headquarters for Europe’s first industrial tobacco operation. Its scale is surpassed in Spain only by the Escorial Palace, and it was designed as a fortified palace to protect the state-run monopoly on tobacco, complete with its own prison and sentries to prevent theft.