Sticks of Fire: a Tampa blog

Jogging along Bayshore Blvd, you might see a small sign alerting you to Tampa’s relationship as a sister city to Oviedo, Spain. I recently learned that the City of Tampa brags about six sisters. Interestinly, the Sister Cities International site lists seven, including Mexico twice. Tampa Bay Illustrated listed eight, as does Wikipedia. Back in 2002, Ernest Hooper tells us there are eight, then names nine. And none of those include Ashdod, Israel, which will become our sister later this week. So nobody keeps perfect track of what’s going on. Let’s move ahead anyway, k?

If you check with Tampa Sister Cities, you’ll see a little more information about some of the places. Unfortunately, I did not gain an abundant amount of understanding at that limited site, so I tried to find a little more information on each of them.

I now present to you Tampa’s Sister Cities, as best as I can tell. I’ll just list all of those that someone somewhere said was our sister.

Agrigento, Italy became our sister in 1991.
Ashdod, Israel will be adopted this week.
Barranquilla, Colombia was welcomed as family, well, I don’t know.
Camarines Sur, Phillipines joined sometime before 2002, maybe.
Cordoba, Argentina is on Hooper’s list.
I couldn’t find out when Granada, Nicaragua joined our group, either.
Izmir, Turkey is also one of our relations.
Tampa welcomed Jaixing, China to the fold in 2002 (I think).
Le Havre, France got siblingized in 1992.
Oviedo, Spain started pulling our pony tail in 1991
Veracruz de Ignacio de la Llave, Mexico is very close in proximity to Boca Del Rio, and may be why it is listed twice on the international site. Unless there are two different cities named Veracruz in Mexico, in which case they may both our sisters (twins?).

Most of the links above are on travel sites, and may be biased. If you are aware of better links for any of these places, I’d sure like to know about ‘em.