Campotinto has an excellent restaurant and small swimming poolEasy as pie … the garden at the Plaza Constitución, Fray Bentos, Uruguay.Easy as pie … the garden at the Plaza Constitución, Fray Bentos, Uruguay.f you are lucky enough to reach the tiny Uruguayan town of Carmelo on a summer evening, you can cycle through tranquil vineyards, past lavender bushes and a yellow chapel glowing in the fading sunset to the Italian social club for dinner. Save dessert for ice-creams at We had come to Fray Bentos through Carmelo, the most northern terminal for ferries from Buenos Aires, and somewhere else with a delicious sense of forgotten time and place. One has been turned into a hotel, the You can get a simple dinner and a drink with a view at Cervecería Hoffman. In the 1920s a British company bought the firm, giving it its local nickname, El Anglo. The production lines have long since closed, the docks are decaying and it has fallen back into sleepy silence, disturbed only by tourists drawn to its strange and striking heritage. Inside, wood burns to charcoal in a hearth several metres wide, to grill the Wealth seeped over into Fray Bentos, so the streets are adorned with strange and charming curiosities, such as the bandstand in the central square which is a copy of the one in Crystal Palace, a lavishly decorated theatre and rows of grand colonial homes, with high barred windows hiding inner courtyards from curious passersby. On the evening we went there was a 60th wedding anniversary, with music seeping through a wall into the annex where we ate, and the odd child in a suit or frilly dress, eyes wide with sugar and excitement, wandering through the door.Industrial revolution … the old Fray Bentos factory is now a Unesco world heritage site.Here’s the beef … the factory was founded by a German inventor of ‘meat extract’.Red sky at night … Almacén de la Capilla in the Carmelo wine district. Meat from Fray Bentos fed troops in both world wars, and British troops even nicknamed one tank Fray Bentos, a dark joke about a crew that were little more than minced meat in a can.A small museum tells the plant’s history and features curiosities such as a two-headed calf and Uruguay’s first lightbulb. Lo Korrea still serves the cheap, hearty food Italian farmers devoured after a day harvesting grapes on Saturday nights and sometimes Sunday lunch. The old wine district of Colonia Estrella is just 15 minutes by bike from Carmelo, across pancake-flat fields and empty roads, where we stayed at a lodge and boutique winery, Uruguay is often overlooked, sandwiched between Argentina and Brazil, its two vast neighbours so famous for their beauty and culture. Its current name, meaning "Friar Benedict", is derived from a reclusive priest.