Last but not least: Phallus as advertising scares away customers

The city of Aveiro is located 250 kilometers north of Lisbon. The statue by 37-year-old artist Umbelina Barros stood there for a short time at the entrance to the fish market. According to Portuguese media reports on Friday, the work was not intended to offend anyone, but the protests showed that there is still a lot of prudery in Portugal today, said the city's culture councillor Maria da Luz Nolasco. However, the protests were so fierce that the city council has now decided to remove the controversial work of art, according to SDA. The statue will be gone by Monday at the latest. However, she has no sympathy for the outraged citizens, said the city councillor for culture. It was almost as if we had returned to the 19th century, when women even had to cover their ankles and nude pictures could not be shown even at art exhibitions, she complained.
However, the background to the protests is not said to have been moral reasons, but business. The vendors at the fish market, ironically the majority of whom are women, have apparently complained that their sales have fallen sharply in recent days following the erection of the statue. A spokeswoman for the protest said that customers were staying away because the statue was vulgar and ugly. In the process, some visitors to the fish market have developed an unparalleled metaphor: Some bashful parents are said to have made a tree out of the penis when trying to explain it to their children. And as Correio da Manha says Orf.at writes, this is the number one topic of conversation in the city.