How Easily One Becomes a Land Owner.
There exist in Montevideo great agencies, like the one called the "Industrial" created in the year 1874, by Mr. Francis Piria, the sole object of which is to make easy the division of the property in the capital and the neighborhood, by purchasing large zones of land and by dividing them into square cuadras, or fractions of over four English acres, when they belong to the town district, and into the best possible form outside.
This agency has created many villages out of the Department of Montevideo, as "Recreo de las Piedras," "Joaquin Suarez," "Buenos Ayres," "Bella Italia" and many others.
The centres of population created by the "Industrial" are over a hundred; some of them have been aggregated to the town district, everyone of them becoming important centres, on account of the number of the inhabitants, and of the increasing value of the land, sold formerly very cheap, and payable at the rate of $2.00 per month.
All the fractions of land have generally been bought by work-people who have built their own houses.
According to the general balance and informations collected down to the year 1891, the "Industrial" agency had made 52,317 proprietors, and the fractions of land sold up to that time were 183,000, the result of the sale being $79,411. The number of houses was 8000.
Those who bought some of those fractions of land a few years ago, payable in the above mentioned conditions, at the rate of 20 or 25 cents per metre, are now-a-days owners of properties which are worth two, three, four and five times more.
The very same thing happens in the colonies or agricultural centres established in many departments of the Republic, the founders of which have given to the settlers all kinds of easy means for establishing themselves.
Families of work-people that had arrived here with nothing but the means of facing the very first necessities have become, after a few years, owners of the land they had bought, payable monthly, and having increased their possessions by buying new land, they have enlarged the sphere of their operations and are now able to work over their own properties in a fully independent and easy situation.
The advantages of such a system will be easily understood.
With what a workman or settler pays monthly for the rent of the land, he makes himself, after a short time, the owner of the land and of the house he lives in, as the monthly rent redeems with a small interest the value of the property.
In such conditions great many people are known who enjoy all these advantages, and many more, who being the proprietors of the land purchased in such a way have made small fortunes.
There cannot be a better way imagined of fixing the immigrants or giving to the peasant all the means of becoming a proprietor and of consecrating himself to highly profitable agricultural industries.