For the better part of 160 years, the Plasencia family grew tobacco for other people.
They left Cuba after the revolution, rebuilt in Nicaragua, fled Nicaragua during the Sandinista uprising, regrouped in Honduras, and came back. Each time, they started over with what they knew: the soil, the seed, the fermentation rooms, the drying barns. They supplied the leaf that went into cigars bearing other families’ names — cigars that won ratings and shelf space and awards while the Plasencias quietly kept farming.
In 2017, Nestor Plasencia decided to keep the best for himself.
The Alma Fuerte was the result. Not a marketing exercise, not a licensing play — a statement from a family that had spent a century and a half perfecting someone else’s product. What does it look like when the most experienced tobacco family in Nicaragua makes something entirely for themselves? No outside blender. No compromised leaf. No split between what you grow and what you smoke.
The Sixto II Hexagono is the answer in cigar form: a 6 by 60 box-pressed gordo with a cross-section that is literally hexagonal. Six sides. Not a gimmick — Plasencia’s Estelí factory built a custom pressing mold for it. The shape compresses the blend into a burn so even and a draw so effortless it feels almost unfair compared to what you’re used to. The dark natural Nicaraguan wrapper, grown in Plasencia’s own Jalapa fields at high elevation, has the oily finish that comes from patient aging, not rushed production.
This is what it looks like when the grower decides to stop selling the best stuff and starts smoking it.
The Family Behind the Cigar
The Plasencia story starts in 1865, when Don Eduardo Plasencia emigrated from the Canary Islands to the Vuelta Abajo region of Cuba and began farming tobacco. The Cuban Revolution ended that chapter. Like many of the great cigar families, the Plasencias rebuilt in Central America — Nicaragua first, then Honduras when the Sandinista revolution turned things violent in the late 1970s, then back to Nicaragua when stability returned in the 1990s.
Today the family manages more than 3,000 acres of tobacco farms and multiple factories in Nicaragua and Honduras. They grow their own seeds, cure their own leaf, and ferment on-site. The vertical integration is total — and it was built almost entirely in service of other brands. For decades, if you smoked a Nicaraguan puro from a major house, there’s a reasonable chance the Plasencias had a hand in the tobacco.
The decision to launch their own label wasn’t ego. It was a demonstration. After 160 years of growing the world’s tobacco, Nestor Plasencia wanted to show what it looked like when you combined full farm-to-finish control with the luxury of keeping the premium leaf for your own blend — rather than selling it forward to whoever was paying that season.
The Sixto II Hexagono
The Alma Fuerte launched in 2017 with several vitolas, but the Sixto II Hexagono is the one that stops people cold. Six inches long, 60 ring gauge, with a cross-section that is a genuine six-sided polygon — not a standard box press, not a rounded gordo, but an honest hexagon. The shape creates uniform pressure across the entire blend, which translates into a burn that stays remarkably true without intervention.
The wrapper is dark natural Nicaraguan leaf from Jalapa — one of Nicaragua’s highest-elevation growing regions, where cooler nights and volcanic soil produce tobacco that leans toward sweetness and complexity rather than raw aggression. The filler is a Criollo ‘98 blend sourced from four distinct Plasencia-owned regions: Condega, Estelí, Jalapa, and Ometepe. Each contributes something specific — Condega’s earthiness, Estelí’s spice, Jalapa’s sweetness, Omotepe’s volcanic smoke. Plasencia grows all of it.
The entire blend was aged for a decade before the line hit shelves. You can taste it.
What to Expect
The Sixto II opens with roast and richness — dark chocolate, baking spice, and a clean hum of black pepper that signals full-body territory without overplaying it. The thick creamy smoke the large ring gauge produces keeps temperatures low throughout the first third.
The second third is where the complexity announces itself. Plum, dried cherry, and cinnamon layer over the chocolate base. Cedar emerges — not the sharp cedar of a young stick, but settled room-note cedar from tobacco that’s had time to relax. Molasses shows up in the retrohale: present, sweet, but never sticky. It’s the kind of note that keeps pulling you back for one more draw.
The final third settles into espresso and earth. The pepper returns, slightly elevated, but balanced against the sweetness that’s been accumulating for the previous hour. It doesn’t turn bitter or harsh the way some full-body cigars do when they get short. The Sixto II stays composed to the nub.
Plan for 75 to 90 minutes. The open draw means you don’t have to work for it — let the cigar do what Plasencia designed it to do.
Value Proposition
At roughly $27 a stick, the Alma Fuerte Sixto II sits in the premium tier without reaching into the stratosphere. Compare it to a Rocky Patel Decade, an Oliva Serie V, or the Davidoff Winston Churchill Late Hour — cigars in the same price bracket with different stories. The Alma Fuerte has something most of them can’t claim: the people who made it also grew every leaf in it, fermented it, aged it, and kept it.
That’s not marketing copy. That’s a 160-year provenance with no parallel in the premium segment.
If you’re shifting toward fuller-body cigars as the season turns — and you should be, the fall humidor rotation is exactly this conversation — the Alma Fuerte is the right move. It’s assertive without being punishing. Complex without being academic. And the Sixto II’s hexagonal shape makes it one of the most recognizable cigars you’ll pull out of your rotation.
The Bottom Line
Plasencia spent more than a century making leaf for other people’s legacy. The Alma Fuerte is what happens when the most experienced tobacco family in Nicaragua decides to build one for their own. The Sixto II Hexagono is the format that shows it best: a six-sided box-pressed gordo that burns with surgical precision and delivers a full-body experience that never loses its grace.
If you haven’t put Plasencia in your rotation yet, this is where to start.
Plasencia Alma Fuerte Sixto II Hexagono is available through authorized premium cigar retailers, approximately $26.99 per stick.