A Spanish founder, an Algarve border town and a family that followed the fish north.

Ramirez is a family-run Portuguese tinned-fish company, trading today as Ramirez & Cª (Filhos), S.A. from Lavra, in the municipality of Matosinhos, north of Porto. Its story begins in the far south. The company says its founder, Sebastian Ramirez, settled in Vila Real de Santo António, the Algarve town on the Guadiana river across from Spain, and set up there in 1853. Time Out Porto described him in 2017 as a Spanish businessman, and the Lusa news agency, in a report carried by ECO in March 2022, gave the same founding year and named Sebastian as the great-grandfather of the man who ran the company into the 2020s.

The company’s own timeline lays out the early decades. It says the business adopted autoclaves for sterilising cans in 1890, and that in 1908 the founder’s son Manuel launched the steam-powered sardine vessel Nossa Senhora da Encarnação. Ramirez also lists past sites in Olhão, Albufeira, Setúbal and Peniche.

The decisive move came in the middle of the twentieth century. According to Lusa’s 2022 report and the company itself, Emílio Ramirez, the founder’s grandson, moved the family’s main factory to Matosinhos in the 1940s, because fish was plentiful there. His son Manuel Guerreiro Ramirez, born in Vila Real de Santo António, took over the running of the Algarve unit in 1962, Lusa reported, and went on to lead the company for decades. Lusa credited him with developing an easy-open can with a ring pull that needed no key, a project it said took three years, and with introducing a quality-control laboratory and a cold chain of freezing stores. He also served as Finland’s consul, as his father had, and as president of the Portuguese canning industry association ANICP for twelve years.

Lithographed tins, medal claims and a portfolio of names for other markets.

Ramirez sells under many names rather than one. Its website lists Ramirez alongside Cocagne, The Queen of the Coast, La Rose, Berthe, Pescador and Renommée, and the company says it has fourteen international brands; Marketeer reported in December 2025 that the company holds twenty-nine registered brands, fourteen of them active, with four sold in Portugal and the rest abroad. English Wikipedia says Cocagne has been exported to the Benelux countries since 1906, and the same article ties other names, such as Tomé and Al-Fares, to particular export markets.

The older packaging survives in museum collections. The Conservas de Portugal catalogue of Portuguese tinned-fish packaging records a lithographed tinplate Cocagne can of mackerel fillets in olive oil, held by the Museu do Trabalho Michel Giacometti in Setúbal, whose text names the packer as Ramirez & Cª (Filhos) Lda. and lists factories at Vila Real de Santo António, Matosinhos and Peniche.

The newer packaging leans on special editions. In May 2026 the Brazilian marketing site Nosso Meio reported that Ramirez marked its 173rd anniversary with limited solid-tuna tins honouring Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, part of an international project called “Lata das Cidades”, with packaging created by Portuguese visual artists and illustrations of the two cities. On its sardines the company points to the blue MSC ecolabel for sustainably certified purse-seine fishing.

Even the factory has been read as packaging. Time Out’s 2017 report on the Lavra plant said that, seen from above, its shape recalls a tin of tuna, and described cans arriving from the ceiling on a purpose-built conveyor, sauces piped from an industrial kitchen and robotic arms in the packing hall.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group are Iberian tinned-fish names, six from Portugal and one from Galicia: Ramirez, Porthos, Ati Manel, Tricana, Bom Petisco, Briosa and Cuca. Canned fish in Portugal is closely tied to the coast and its fishing ports; English Wikipedia notes, for example, that production and exports of canned fish in Matosinhos, north of Porto, rose during the world wars and peaked between 1940 and 1960, and that the industry began to decline between 1970 and 1989, when several factories closed.

A tinned-fish brand’s identity is usually carried less by the fish than by the tin itself: its printed wrapper or lid, the name, and the town or harbour it promises. Behind those labels the trade is often less simple than it looks, because a single cannery may pack several brands of its own, a brand may outlive the factory that first used it, and an old name may pass from one family or group to another. That makes the plain questions worth asking for each name: who started it, who owns it now, and where its fish is actually canned.

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

One new factory, five generations and a family that kept control.

The biggest recent change was industrial. Marketeer reported in December 2025 that Ramirez had gathered production from several older plants, including those in Leça da Palmeira, Vila Real de Santo António and Peniche, into a single new factory in Lavra, Matosinhos, which the company said it built in 2013; the company’s timeline and Lusa date the start of operations at the plant, named Ramirez 1853, to 2015, its first new unit in more than seventy years. The company describes the site as green and highly automated, with rainwater harvesting, natural light, X-ray inspection of cans and robotic packing, and it runs visits, a shop and a museum there.

The family remains in charge. Manuel Guerreiro Ramirez died in March 2022, Lusa reported, and the company describes itself as in its fifth generation, with his sons Manuel and Vasco running it; Marketeer’s 2025 piece named Manuel Ramirez as chief executive and noted that his eldest son, of the sixth generation, also works in the business.

The name needs a little care online. Ramírez is a common Spanish surname, and the canner’s own site is ramirez.pt.

For a design guide, Ramirez shows how one family business carries several national brand names, lithographed export tins and a modern factory under one family name and the founding year 1853. Compare Porthos, the musketeer-branded sardines of its Matosinhos neighbour Conservas Portugal Norte, and Saupiquet, the Nantes sardine canner. For this guide we use Atlantic navy, tin gold and lithograph red with a high-contrast serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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