In the imagination of writer Jules Verne, Fray Bentos was responsible for serving breakfast to the first travellers on the moon. For Jorge Luis Borges, it was the Uruguayan home town for the fictional Ireneo Funes, a teenager with impeccable memory. To the troops and Europeans of the World War I and II eras the name conjured up the image of food – tinned corned beef, OXO bouillon cubes and more than 200 other products which would emerge from “the kitchen of the world” until 1979. Today, the once booming industrial park which ran for nearly 130 years is slowly being restored as a museum.
Fray Bentos
The capital of Uruguay’s Río Negro province is home to just under 22,000 mate-drinking citizens who wave at strangers, smile and say “buenos días” with a kind of friendly enthusiasm severely lacking just across the river in Argentina. The small city celebrated its 150th anniversary in 2009 and offers visitors a range of activities as wide as any more urban locale.
The Young Theatre, Luis Alberto Solari Art Museum, outdoor play and dance venue The Summer Theatre, numerous plazas and parks, a museum and gallery for local artists called The Proa, beaches and fishing at the Uruguayan river resort Las Cañas, as well as the stunning cathedral Iglesia Nuestra Senora del Pilar are definite attributes. But despite Fray Bentos being a quiet and rural town, it boasts an extremely industrial and international past alongside an uncertain future.
A Proud Past
In 19th century Europe, poor people were having trouble buying meat. Fortunately for them and millions to come after, Justus von Liebig, a German chemist, had a solution. Liebig developed a meat ‘tonic’ which later became the world-renowned bullion cube. In 1865, Liebig moved to Uruguay where he went into the cattle processing business with Belgian engineer and friend Georg Giebert. A monstrous amount of beef was needed to create the “extract” – 32kg of beef to make 1kg of Liebig’s tonic, but hardly anything went to waste. Blood was used in soil fertilizer, hides made into leather and hooves into glue. Soon, other products emerged as well, and the cattle factory prodded the Río de la Plata’s industrial revolution to life.
The Liebig’s Extract Meat Company would eventually come to process an entire cow every five minutes, employ over 5,000 workers from more than 50 countries and revolutionize the standard of living for factory workers. Fray Bentos is also famed for the use of electricity three years before the capital city of Montevideo, and it is home to the deepest port in the northern part of the Uruguayan river. Almost all of the country’s wood production is now exported through this port.
A Factory Forms
With funding from Europe and high demand for its products, the Liebig Extract Meat Company grew. In 1887 the factory had reached such a size that the mainly German and English workforce constructed their own district. Houses, cleaning and garbage services, electricity and water were soon part of daily life. Another workers’ district was added in 1890 and a hospital followed in 1895. Children were allowed to become factory workers at age 14, but only after completing their first series of studies at the company school and with their parents’ approval. Although a factory work day was around 16 hours, the life of the average Liebig employee was good.
According to historian and Museum of the Industrial Revolution director Rene Boretto Ovalle, the company town called ‘La Ranchada’ built by the workers established a much higher standard of living than the surrounding areas. Golf and tennis courts, football team called ‘La Estrella’, workers band as well as a cultural centre added to the prosperous life of Liebig workers.
The Anglo Appears
After processing a record 208,980 animals in 1890, the Liebig factory was replaced by Anglo of Uruguay in 1924. Throughout the next 47 years, the Anglo factory developed meat processing technology more advanced than any other country in South America. It would process 400 cows an hour, 2,000 sheep per day, and develop around 200 animal and vegetable products.
In 1943, more than 16 million cans of corned beef were shipped from the port of Fray Bentos to war-torn Europe during World War II. The enormous five-story Anglo meat house began operating in 1920 and helped establish Uruguay’s “epoch of the fat cows”. For a time, it also made Uruguayan currency more valuable than the US dollar.
During his visit to Uruguay in 1999, even heir to the British throne Prince Charles joked about being raised on Fray Bentos corned beef. “I was brought up on it, I remember eating corned beef until it came out of my ears,” Charles told local businessmen.
Sadly, the Anglo was to be the last survivor in the long history of Fray Bentos’ famous factories. In 1979 the factory closed after Europe and the United States cut back on purchases from Latin America.
A Present in Repair
Standing empty until restoration in 2005, the Museum of the Industrial Revolution is once again producing the famous corned beef that made its name and showing off the antiquities that once made it advanced. On display in the museum are old photos of the working factory, equipment from the factory fire fighters, and all manner of packaging incarnations. But also on display are some elements of the odder side of the business – a two-headed calf preserved in formaldehyde and a sledge hammer with a built-in gun for a more humane method of slaughtering cows.
According to Rene Ovalle, the life of the town has always been tied to the factory, which had fallen into extreme disrepair, and through its restoration it will bring new life into the area.
Just across the river, another factory is also providing jobs to the area which has almost twice the amount of unemployed as the capital of Montevideo. The installation of two wood pulp production plants used for making paper just a few kilometres from Fray Bentos is causing a serious rift in relations with the neighbouring Argentine city of Gualeguaychú.
Argentine critics believe the plant, owned by Finnish firm Metsa-Botnia, will pollute the river, affecting farmland and tourist sites in both countries. For Uruguay, the plant represents the largest investment in the country and a promising source of exports to European and US markets. But with no agreement reached yet, the international bridge connecting Argentina to Uruguay in Fray Bentos is closed, preventing tourism and making transportation between the countries more difficult.
So whether Fray Bentos’ new factory impacts life as much as the Liebig Extract Meat Company, it is still on the map. In years to come, the town may even become a UNESCO world heritage site, although The World Union for Conservation and International Counsel of Monuments and Places have yet to finish their evaluations. So with big hopes, a wide welcome and innumerable points of interest, the people and history make any trip to “the kitchen of the world” a savoury one.