The village of 1,200 inhabitants where half of the bacon sold throughout Spain is produced
Despite the large volume of production, even truck access to the factory has not been adapted.
San Miguel de Balenyà (Osona)It's a village in Osona with little more than four streets and only about 1,200 inhabitants, but it's home to the meat processing plant that produces 45% of the bacon sold in all of Spain. The company employs more than half the village's population, and 55% of those workers are foreigners from forty different countries. The village is called Sant Miquel de Balenyà and belongs to the municipality of Seva; the meat processing plant is Embutidos Monells. They could be considered an example of what's happening throughout the region, but perhaps taken to an extreme.
Embutidos Monells was initially a family business, but at the end of 2014 it became part of the Argal Alimentación group, 50.1% of which is currently owned by Morliny Foods, which in turn belongs to the Chinese WH group, the second largest meat processing company in the world. That's why the residents of Sant Miquel de Balenyà say that "the company is now owned by a Chinese man."
Be that as it may, the fact is that the meat processing plant has doubled its workforce and has continued to grow over the last decade, but without any planning whatsoever for infrastructure, worker transportation, or even housing.
Segregation
The result is that almost all of the company's workers don't live in the village, commuting in their own cars. Only a few travel by train. And the few who do live there are completely segregated. The residents don't interact with them, and they don't interact with the residents. They are concentrated in a cluster of old houses at the foot of the road that runs through the village, and they shop at a small grocery store there, also run by an immigrant. Others live in the so-called Mas flats: a dilapidated four-story building with a yellow facade, located literally in the village's industrial park and separated from the town center by the railway line. Crossing the tracks is impossible. Those who live there must walk over the tracks, including children who make this journey every day to get to school.
“I’d prefer to live in Vic, but there’s no way to find an apartment,” says Bafode Cissé, who is from Guinea Conakry, works in Monells, and lives in the Mas apartments, in a rented room for which he pays 270 euros a month. “The few shops here are too expensive,” he explains. That’s why he shops at a Mercadona supermarket, which is much cheaper, but about a 40-minute walk away, in the neighboring town of Tona. Bafode is 51 years old and has lived in Spain for two decades, but his wife and three children remain in Guinea Conakry because they can’t find housing here. And it’s not for lack of funds. In Monells, he earns up to 1,700 euros a month if he also works weekends.
Access to the factory remains the same as it was a decade ago, when it was a family business: a narrow street where trucks have to make a sharp turn and pass almost shoulder to shoulder with the houses. "We pay taxes just like everyone else," complains Elena Morelló Oliete, who lives in the corner building where the trucks turn. From her dining room window, you can see the trucks passing just a meter from the facade. "Noise, dirt, bad smells, traffic," lists another neighbor, Rafael Martín, who has lived right across from Monells for 23 years and has watched the company expand and change the town's landscape.
Most of the houses in Sant Miquel de Balenyà were built from the 1960s onwards for the workers of the Can Vilella chair factory. Its owner then created a housing cooperative to attract workers to an area where there was hardly any labor available. This explains why most of the houses in the village are the same: small, two-story dwellings with an interior courtyard.
"In total, about 190 houses were built," estimates Josep Pujols, who worked at the chair factory and is now 80 years old. "Each house cost 227,000 pesetas for seeds, the Ministry of Housing subsidized them with 20,000 pesetas, and we laid the foundations ourselves with picks and shovels," he recalls. He also confesses that the cooperative had an unwritten rule that "no member could be Castilian": "We didn't want Andalusians to be part of it." Even then, newcomers without resources were not welcome.
Would it be possible for Monells to do something similar today? "We can collaborate, but we can't replace the responsibility of the public administration," replies the company's CEO, Maria Àngels Sebastià, who considers it "complicated." "If modifying the urban development plan is proving difficult, I don't know how housing could be generated," she adds, referring to the many efforts Monells has made in the last ten years to improve access to the factory, without tangible results so far. Every day, some eighty trucks and hundreds of cars pass through Sant Miquel de Balenyà to get to the factory.
Bureaucracy
"We work well with the Seva Town Council, but it's a small council that lacks funding and the power to be heard," he continues, explaining the council's limited capacity. He also asserts that he has always found "a positive attitude" from all levels of government to improve access for the company, "but then they're unable to make things happen." This is due to bureaucracy, the complexity of internal processes, regulations... "That's what I miss about public institutions: a long-term perspective on the country's needs."
Monells, which in 2024 had a turnover of €184 million and net profits of €6.35 million, has even offered to finance the construction of a level crossing so that trucks don't have to pass through the middle of the town. In exchange, the Seva Town Council has agreed to modify the urban development plan so that the company can expand even further horizontally. The agreement is pending approval from the Ministry of Transport.
The Seva councilor for Territorial Strategy, Andreu Ulied, confirms that they have been working for years to find a solution for the truck traffic and now, finally, it seems the problem will be solved. However, he admits that housing and transportation for the workers are issues that haven't even been discussed. The general manager of Monells argues that they haven't proposed transportation for their staff either because "the workers' schedules are so varied that it would be difficult to organize their commute."
"We have the C-17 highway right next door and the railway line," states the mayor of Seva, Pol Barnils (Sumem), implying that the town is so well connected that Monells' workers could easily live in other municipalities in Osona. In Sant Miquel de Balenyà, he asserts, there is no social housing, and the few units that exist are "for the elderly and young people."
The president of the Decentralized Municipal Entity (EMD) of Sant Miquel de Balenyà, Inès Puigneró, confirms that there are no plans for housing construction because "there is no land" in the town, nor for resolving the situation of the tenants in the Mas apartments, although she admits that the road crossing "is dangerous." "Right now we are focused on solving the truck problem," she states. And she adds: "We have given permission for the expansion of Monells, because we want the town to prosper."
As in other towns in the region, squatting has begun to occur in the town. Very few cases, however, have generated widespread alarm, to the point that residents have created a WhatsApp group called Sant Miquel de Balenyà Security, where they often blame outsiders for all the town's problems.
"We can't find Catalans who want to work in the factories. 90% of the new hires are immigrants," emphasizes the CEO of Monells, clarifying that the progress of her company and many other industries depends on all this foreign labor. The problem is that, for the moment, no one has planned where all this workforce, which makes the meat industry one of the economic engines of Catalonia, should live.