This is a funny stamp, but it turns out high quality cigar tobacco is an important crop of this tiny country. What better way to show that off than creating a giant one? So slip on your smoking jacket, light your cigar, take tour first sip of your adult beverage, and sit back in your most comfortable chair. Welcome to todays offering from The Philatelist.
This stamp looks a little different from the last Andorra stamp presented here. That one was from the side of Andorra that has French administration. Here we have the Spanish side and one can see the change in language and currency. The Spanish side was a bishopric subject to the Bishop of Urgel. This changed somewhat in 1993 but there is still seperate Spanish and French stamps.
Todays stamp is issue A17 a 5 Peseta stamp issued by Andorra on December 5th, 1972. It was a 6 stamp issue in various denominations featuring Andorran customs including singers, dancers, cigar smokers, and even a hermit. According to the Scott catalog, the stamp is worth 60 cents unused.
Andorra is a tiny mountainous country with only 2 percent of the land being arable. For that reason, most of the food has to be imported. Andorra uses about 8 percent of it’s farmland in the production of tobacco. This is of high quality mostly for cigars and mostly for export. A cigar usually contains various tobacco leaves from different places.
The integration with the EU as been a little problematic for tobacco. The EU allowed Andorra to keep it’s low domestic price but then enforced duty requirements similar to alcohol for a visitor taking it with him. This perhaps turns a few fans into smugglers. As the economy developed more and more of the workforce shifted to providing tourist services. A reflection of this is the former Reig tobacco factory. this has now been repackaged as a tobacco museum.
Well my cigar burned out, i did not have the guts or stamina to try a giant one, and so I will have to wait till tomorrow when there will be another story that can be learned from stamp collecting.