Fray Bentos
Fray Bentos is a town of Uruguay and capital of department of Río Negro.
History
The town of Fray Bentos was founded in 1853 and was built to be able to accommodate the ships of strong tonnages, which the port of the town of Gualeguaychú could not do. It was officially founded the April 16th 1859 under the name of villa Independencia by the Uruguyan authorities.One also can that the name Fray Bentos must come from the group of monk (brother results then in fray ) sent by the Argentinian government in 1620 to inform the natives.
Geography
The city is located on bank is Río Uruguay, upstream of the junction of the Río Negro in the Uruguay river.
Economy
The city has a port out of deep water for the Navire S of strong tonnage that the country divides with the Argentine.The industry group Finnish Botnia currently builds a manufacturing plant of Cellulose. The investment in the project is approximately of a billion dollar and the factory employs directly or indirectly more than 8.000 people. Only a conflict on this subject burst between the government Uruguyan and Argentinian since the second affirms that the factory would pollute the river and the April 30th 2005, approximately 40.000 Argentinian blocked the Pont connecting Uruguay to Argentina. The December 20th 2005 a study of the the World Bank concluded that the factory would not have an negative impact on the environment or tourism in one or the other country, but the crisis is not finished since into March 2006, it was transformed into diplomatic crisis, which has to oblige Botnia to suspend the implementation of the factory.
Its more traditional economy was based on the production of Viande but this domination had lost little by little with the closing of the most important Usine of conditioning of the area in 1975.