South Korea’s Olympic crowd drawn to ‘penis park’
Even the bright red lighthouse in the tiny South Korean port of Sinnam is shaped like a penis.
The port is home to Haesindang Park, better known as “Penis Park”, a monument to fertility, born from a legend about a virgin and fish. A normally obscure attraction, it is drawing curious crowds of visitors from the nearby Winter Olympics.
There are penis totem poles, penis benches and penis wind chimes. There is even a penis-shaped cannon, with a warning to tourists that it should not be mounted.
“I’ve been all over the world and I’ve never seen anything like this,” said Keith Childs, a Londoner who was visiting the park along with other people working at the Pyeongchang Olympics, being staged about an hour’s drive away.
The legend behind the park has been painstakingly chiselled into a row of stone penises. It tells of a virgin who died in a storm as her boyfriend collected seaweed from a rock in a nearby cove.
According to one version of the legend, the village was unable to catch fish after she died until one fisherman urinated into the sea. The fishermen later erected a shrine and a phallus on …read more