A puro is a cigar made entirely from tobacco grown in a single country. The wrapper, the binder, and all of the filler leaves come from the same nation, with no imported tobacco in the blend. The Spanish word means simply “pure,” and the term distinguishes a single-origin cigar from the more common multi-country blends that dominate premium production.
By legal and traditional definition, every Cuban cigar is a Cuban puro: Cuba does not allow imported tobacco in its cigars, so a Cohiba or a Partagás is by definition all-Cuban. Outside Cuba, puros are a deliberate stylistic choice. Padrón makes only Nicaraguan puros across its 1964 and Family Reserve lines, using tobacco from the Estelí and Jalapa regions exclusively. Joya de Nicaragua likewise produces all-Nicaraguan cigars. The Honduran-puro tradition is carried by Camacho, particularly in its Corojo line.
The case for a puro is one of coherence. A blender working with tobacco from a single country produces a cigar that expresses that country’s terroir clearly, without the cross-country balancing that multi-origin blends require. The case against is loss of range: certain wrappers (Connecticut shade, Sumatra) cannot be grown in every country, so a puro from the wrong country might never reach the wrapper expression a multi-origin blend could.
For more on cigar construction, see The Anatomy of a Cigar.