SINNAM, SOUTH KOREA ¨C 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 based on the ¡°Legend of Auebawi and Haesindang,¡± 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, about an hour¡¯s drive away.
The legend behind the park has been painstakingly chiseled 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 the cliffs of the village to satisfy the virgin¡¯s spirit.
Confronting and unusual to some eyes, the penis park is less of an oddity in a country with one of the lowest fertility rates in the world. In the OECD, the 35-member club of mostly rich nations, South Korea has the lowest rate.
The country now has several ¡°penis parks,¡± so many that Haesindang markets itself as the ¡°only one on the east coast.¡±
Just 1.17 babies per woman are born each year in South Korea, according to the latest government data, for 2016.
The rate is set to hit a historic low of 1.04 this year, according to a government official.
¡°Young people face a harsh reality, which includes high unemployment rates and an unstable job prospective, so individuals choose not to have a child to sustain their own lives,¡± said Ryu Yang-ji, director at the Presidential Committee on Aging Society and Population Policy.
With your current subscription plan you can comment on stories. However, before writing your first comment, please create a display name in the Profile section of your subscriber account page.