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Tampa began as Fort Brooke, a US Army post established in 1824 at the mouth of the Hillsborough River on Tampa Bay, and the city was first incorporated in 1855.

Tampa is the county seat of Hillsborough County and had a population of 384,959 in the 2020 Census, with an estimated population of 413,554 in 2025, making it Florida's third-largest city, according to the US Census Bureau.

Tampa has about 166,278 households with an average of 2.31 persons per household, and about 50.3% of its housing units are owner-occupied, according to the US Census Bureau.

Tampa's cigar era began when Vicente Martinez Ybor founded Ybor City in 1885, soon after Henry Plant's railroad reached Tampa in 1884, turning the city into the 'Cigar Capital of the World'.

At its peak in 1929, Tampa's Ybor City cigar factories hand-rolled more than 500 million cigars in a single year.

Tampa held its first Gasparilla Pirate Festival in 1904, an invasion-themed celebration named for the legendary pirate Jose Gaspar that remains the city's signature annual event.

On January 1, 1914, pilot Tony Jannus flew the world's first scheduled commercial airline flight from St. Petersburg to Tampa across the bay, carrying one paying passenger.

Bayshore Boulevard in Tampa runs about 4.5 miles along Tampa Bay and is recognized as the longest continuous sidewalk in the United States.

The University of Tampa occupies the former Tampa Bay Hotel, a grand 1891 resort built by railroad magnate Henry Plant and now preserved in part as the Henry B. Plant Museum, famous for its silver Moorish minarets.

The University of South Florida, one of Florida's largest public universities, has its main campus in Tampa.