From Havana to the sardine canneries of Vigo.

Palacio de Oriente is the brand of Conservas Antonio Alonso S.A., a family canning company from Vigo, on the Galician coast. The company dates its origins to 1873 and names its founder as Juan Antonio Alonso Santodomingo. Its own history says he was born in Bayona in 1844 and, before turning eighteen, emigrated to Havana, where he spent almost twenty years in the textile trade and met his wife, Eloísa Giménez-Cuenca; they had six children. English Wikipedia gives the same birthplace and dates his years in Havana from 1862 to 1881. A 2015 history of the firm in the Vigo magazine VigoÉ, by Fernando Torres Carbajo, says municipal documents record his birth in Vigo, and notes that other sources give Baiona.

The sources also differ on when the canning business began. The company gives 1873; English Wikipedia says he started his own canning venture in 1886 with a partner, Benito Albela, and ran it alone from 1890. The company’s timeline puts the building of its Vigo factory in 1886, on the site then known as Campo da Barxa, now the Arenal, with sardines in oil as its main product. In 1892, it says, Alonso bought two steam fishing boats, the San Antonio and the Santo Domingo, to fish for sea bream.

In 1918 his sons Rodrigo, Antonio, Salvador and Mauro formed the partnership Antonio Alonso Hijos. During the First World War, the company says, the family became a supplier of tinned food to the armies and opened a branch in Bordeaux, later moved to Nice.

Palais d’Orient, for France and Belgium.

The brand began in French. The company says it was founded as an exporter to France and Belgium, the most knowledgeable markets for tinned fish at the time, and that its first brand, «Palais d’Orient», was well received at the Brussels international fair in 1922. VigoÉ says the firm also sold to Spanish-speaking markets including Mexico, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Uruguay and Argentina, and that the name was later rendered in Spanish as Palacio de Oriente. A company profile published by the Foro de Marcas Renombradas Españolas dates that change to 1947, the year it says the business became a limited company.

The 1920s brought new plants. The company says it bought a salting plant at Pescadoira, in Bueu, in 1922, opened a factory at Setúbal, in Portugal, in 1924, in response to a sardine crisis in the Rías Baixas, and opened another at Celeiro, on the Cantabrian coast of Lugo, in 1925, for bonito and anchovy. King Alfonso XIII visited the Vigo factory in September 1927, it says. VigoÉ names Antonio Alonso among the large Spanish canners of the period, alongside Massó, Albo and Curbera.

In 1940 the business divided. According to the company, Mauro continued on his own, while Rodrigo, Antonio and Salvador formed a new company, Conservas Antonio Alonso. Antonio’s son Guillermo Alonso Meléndez took charge of the Setúbal factory, and Antonio’s grandson Guillermo Alonso Jáudenes later took over the management; the company dates his appointment, and its conversion into a sociedad anónima, to 1967, while VigoÉ gives 1969 for his taking charge and 1977 for the change of legal form.

The Atlantic cannery tradition.

The seven brands in this group are all tinned-fish names, from brands based in Spain, Italy and the United States: Matiz, Palacio de Oriente, Albo, Rio Mare, Mare Aperto, AsdoMAR and Wild Planet. Tinned-fish brands sit at many different points in the trade, from family canneries that still carry a founder’s name to labels that belong to much larger food groups, and the same name can appear on a delicatessen shelf and in a supermarket aisle. Two of the seven share an owner: Italy’s Bolton Group, based in Milan, lists both Rio Mare and Wild Planet among its food brands, having announced its acquisition of Wild Planet in August 2021.

A tinned-fish brand’s identity is carried less by the fish than by the tin: its label, its colours, its name and the place it promises. The company behind a name may have changed hands, moved its canning or bought its fish from far away, which makes the plain questions worth asking: who started the brand, who owns it now, and where its fish is caught, packed and canned.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its fish is processed and how its tins and labels have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

From Vigo to Bueu.

Production has moved out of Vigo in stages. The company says its Guixar plant closed in 1971, when Celeiro specialised in tuna and Bueu took the other products, with management and offices kept in Vigo; the offices moved to the Vigo–Bayona road in 1989. A fire destroyed the Bueu factory in 2012, it says, and a new plant in the Castiñeiras industrial park at Bueu was officially opened in 2013. In 2016 tuna processing moved there from Celeiro. The company now describes its headquarters as Vigo and its production plant as Bueu, in the province of Pontevedra. Mundo Latas reported in October 2023 that the firm still kept offices and a warehouse in Vigo.

The range is built around three products: bonito del norte, light tuna and mussels from the Galician rías, the company says. It says that since 2018 all the mussels processed in its plant fall under the protected designation of origin Mejillón de Galicia, from rafts (bateas) in the Galician estuaries; that its bonito and organic Cantabrian anchovies gained Marine Stewardship Council certification in 2012; and that in 2019 it launched a Sabores del Mundo range of mussels in sauces from other cuisines. The company’s other registered brands include Ardora, Albatros and Alonso, according to the Foro de Marcas Renombradas Españolas.

The family is still in charge. Guillermo Alonso Jáudenes died in May 2014, VigoÉ reported, and the company says it is led today by the fifth generation of the Alonso family, with Iván Alonso-Jáudenes Curbera as general manager. It says it sells in more than 30 countries, with Latin America, the United States, Italy, France and Britain among its main markets, and Alimarket reported in June 2021 that the company planned to enter new sales channels and markets at home and abroad.

For a design guide, Palacio de Oriente shows a nineteenth-century export name carried into a modern supermarket range. Compare Calvo, another Galician canner, and Albo, a Vigo contemporary. For this guide we use palace navy, gilt and a ría blue with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Palacio de Oriente’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.