We often think of Tampa and St. Petersburg as sister cities in a sense. However, both actually have official sister cities that are scattered around the world. The first sister cities began partnering in 1957 under the presidential administration of Dwight Eisenhower.
In 1958, Caracas, Venezuela was named Tampa’s Sister City. Three years later, in 1961, Tampa gained a second sister city, Cordoba, Argentina. Neither Caracas nor Cordoba (or Granada, Nicaragua, which solemnized a sister city pact with Tampa in 1976) are current sisters with Tampa. However, Tampa does have several other international siblings.
(Courtesy of Tampa Sister Cities)
In all, Tampa has twelve current sister cities, including Barranquilla, Columbia (1968); Agrigento, Italy (1991), Le Havre, France (1992), Oviedo, Spain (1992), Boca del Rio and Vera Cruz, Mexico (2002), Ashdod, Israel (2005), Izmir, Turkey (2005), Porto Alegre, Brazil (2013), the county of South Dublin, Ireland (2015), Lanzhou, China (2016), and Heraklion, Greece (2019).
Two of those cities have a special relationship with Tampa and its history: Agrigento, Italy and Oviedo, Spain. Agrigento, located on the island of Sicily, was the home of many Sicilian immigrants who made their way to Tampa in the late 1800s and early 1900s.
Similarly, immigrants poured into Tampa from Oviedo, the capital of the principality of Asturias in northern Spain. So many people came to Tampa from Oviedo and the surrounding areas that they created their own social and mutual aid club, the Centro Asturiano.
Tampa’s local sister city, St. Petersburg also participates in the international sister cities program. St. Pete’s first foray into the partnership came about in September 1961 when it united to form a sisterhood with Takamatsu, Japan.
It was the Japanese city that first reached out, but the offer was rebuffed at first by then-mayor Edward Brantley. Brantley left office in the fall of 1961 and St. Pete’s new mayor, Herman Goldner, responded favorably to the request by his counterpart in Takamatsu, Mayor Teruta Kunito. The relationship between the two coastal, tourist-friendly cities is still going strong today.
St. Petersburg also has a sister city relationship with the “other” St. Petersburg – in Russia. Termed a Friendship City, which is a less-formal agreement but still one that is authorized and administered by Sister Cities International, the original St. Petersburg makes a lot of sense as a sister to our sunshine city. The local St. Petersburg was named for the Russian city by Peter Demens, owner of the Orange Belt Railroad and one of the Florida city’s founders (he also named Odessa on the Hillsborough/Pasco border). Demens’ railroad traveled the length of the Pinellas Peninsula in the mid-1890s and terminated at the Tampa Bay waterfront, where he named the new town after his hometown in Russia. Despite not blossoming into full sisterhood, that relationship endures as well.
Rodney Kite-Powell is a Tampa-born author, the official historian of Hillsborough County and the director of the Touchton Map Library at the Tampa Bay History Center, where he has worked since 1995.
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