- Title: PORTUGAL: Portuguese pottery penises face the chop
- Date: 5th July 2008
- Summary: CLOSE OF JUG READING "Souvenir from Portugal"
- Embargoed: 20th July 2008 13:00
- Keywords:
- Location: Portugal
- Country: Portugal
- Topics: Arts / Culture / Entertainment / Showbiz
- Reuters ID: LVAB1QVOYLGYFQ7PK3Z6OQ612XNY
- Story Text: Proud erotic pottery makers, famous for their ceramic penises, are facing the threat of extinction in a small Portuguese village.
When Francisco and Casilda Figueiredo, 68 and 65, eventually retire they may close a chapter on a proud, age-old Portuguese handicraft - making ornamental ceramic penis statues.
For more than three decades, the sprightly but elderly couple have carefully shaped thousands of ceramic male organs, moulding them into upright shapes and painting them in life-like colours to be exported to Germany, France and North America.
Francisco and Casilda still toil away in a humble village workshop in the Caldas da Rainha region, about 100 kilometres north of Lisbon, but say the tradition is now dying out.
The days of the ceramics trade here are numbered and the couple sees no possibilities of survival, Casilda explained.
"There were many people making ceramics, but now locally there is just us, and now locally only us continue doing it, clandestine, I don't say there aren't one or two places doing it to," she said as he prepared moulds of the couple's top of the range two-foot manhood-shaped bottles in his workshop.
The tradition is said to have started in Caldas da Rainha when King Dom Luis, who ruled from 1861 to 1889, suggested that local potters make something more interesting.
"The tradition neither I nor nobody can explain it very much because nobody knows how this started, it is assumed that was when King D.Luis came to Caldas and asked Bordalo Pinheiro to do something different of what he usually did, Bordalo Pinheiro grabbed a piece of clay and made a man sex , and that's how people say that this pottery born," said Francisco.
A renowned caricaturist, Rafael Bordalo Pinheiro, gave the initial inspiration, prompting Caldas da Rainha to expand on its tradition as a pottery centre.
"I had years with more than one thousand bottles produced for month," Francisco recalled.
The couple produce ceramic mugs with a penis sticking out of the bottom or the side, penis-shaped bottles and ceramic football figures with the male organ popping out erect from under a flag.
"I exported to Germany, Spain, England, Switzerland almost everywhere in Europe, today we don't have requests, Caldas pottery has decrease," he continued.
Francisco said that during the peak of their business, which they have had for three decades, they were producing 1,000 penis bottles a month. - Copyright Holder: REUTERS
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