Fray Bentos, Uruguay: The Meat Extract Works on the River Uruguay

How Fray Bentos began

Fray Bentos began as a town named Villa Independencia in 1859, according to the World Heritage Site listing for the Fray Bentos Cultural-Industrial Landscape. Its meat plant, aimed at the European market, began operating on the Uruguay River in 1865. The same page gives 1863 as the founding year in a trivia section, so sources differ by two years. Everything from cattle pasture to shipping took place on site.

The German Liebig Extract of Meat Company founded and built the works. It made meat extract and corned beef from 1865 to 1924, and the site was the first place where beef extract was applied industrially.

Liebig, Giebert and the extract

The Google Arts and Culture story on the Anglo plant says the meat extract relied on a formula developed by German chemist Justus von Liebig, who lived from 1803 to 1873, and that German engineer George Giebert provided the business initiative. The company was first called Liebig's Extract of Meat Company, or LEMCO.

The plant exported canned meat and meat extract to five continents for almost 120 years. In 1898, 450 ships arrived at its wharves. The Liebig laboratory was a research and development lab rather than an academic one.

El Anglo and the Vestey Group

In 1924 the United Kingdom's Vestey Group acquired the site and built a new plant. This extended production to frozen meat, and the plant was renamed Frigorifico Anglo del Uruguay, known as El Anglo. According to Google Arts and Culture, the company was called LEMCO until 1924, then Frigorifico Anglo of Uruguay, and later Frigorifico Fray Bentos until it closed.

The nearby Barrio Anglo was described as a city within a city, with a hospital, a school, a social club and a football squad. Today about 900 people live in the surrounding neighborhood, many of them descendants of former workers.

What survives and why UNESCO listed it

The plant ceased operations in 1979. It was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2015 under criteria ii and iv. Remaining structures include a huge cold storage building, a tall brick boiler chimney, workers' housing, holding pens and the slaughter yard. Power came from oil-fueled, water-tube steam generators, four dating from 1906 and six from 1922, and over- and underground tunnels moved animals within the factory.

The site is now the Museum of the Industrial Revolution, which makes it one of the few places where the full path from pasture to export can be walked.

Costs and limits of the model

The sources opened for this profile focus on the buildings and the company, not on labor conditions or the effect on local ranchers. The site's long dependence on a single foreign-owned employer, followed by its 1979 closure, shows the risk of that structure: when the plant stopped, so did the work that supported the company town.

Anyone writing about working life at El Anglo should consult the museum and the UNESCO evaluation for details beyond this summary.

Learn more

Readers can compare Fray Bentos with other beef export towns through the ranching section of farm.FM and a farm.FM story about Uruguay's cattle trade.