Fray Bentos Industrial Landscape
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How it came to be
The Fray Bentos works stand on land projecting into the Uruguay River west of the town. In 1859 the English landowner Richard Hughes built a meat-salting plant here. In 1862 the German railway engineer George Christian Giebert read Justus von Liebig's writings and saw that meat extract could be made cheaply in South America from cattle otherwise killed only for their hides, and he opened a test plant on the site.
The Liebig's Extract of Meat Company was registered in London on 4 December 1865. It took about 30 kg of meat to make 1 kg of extract, and by 1875 the plant was producing 500 tonnes a year. From 1873 it also made tinned corned beef, sold under the name Fray Bentos. Its products fed troops in the First World War, and the company provided workers' housing, social and sports facilities and English lessons.
In 1924 the British Vestey Group took over the works, renamed them Frigorífico Anglo and began exporting frozen meat. At its peak the plant employed 5,000 people in a town of 12,000, drawing workers of more than 50 nationalities. Demand fell after 1950, and production ended in 1979. Part of the site became the Museum of the Industrial Revolution in 2005, and the landscape was inscribed in 2015.
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