Sexy Valencian Architecture

Although it appears to be a church at first sight, or a monastery at least, Valencia’s La Lonja is in fact a civic building, and one of the most curious in Christendom.

Built in the Gothic style between 1482 and 1548, La Lonja was Valencia’s silk exchange in medieval times, when the silk route from the Orient reached Valencia, where an intense silk industry flourished with up to 5,000 workshops operating at one time in and around the Velluters district until an epidemic destroyed a large number of the local mulberry trees which the silk worms fed on.

The building, the work of the Catalan architect Pere Compte, who died in 1506, was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1996.

Perhaps the most remarkable feature of the building is the series of pornographic sculptures, almost unnoticeable if you don’t know they are there, which stare down, with their contorted faces, or sometimes their bare cheeks, at the thousands of tourists who visit the site.

La Lonja is not the only building in Valencia decorated in medieval lusty figures in their birthday suits; the Catedral itself has a sculpture of a woman showing her breasts, and yet nobody knows who was responsible for these images, or how they managed to get away with it for so long.

Compte was also responsible for the Cathedral and the Torres de Quart, but it is La Lonja, situated just in front of the medieval site of what used to be the city brothel, which occupied four streets at its zenith, which to this day receives an outstanding almost half a million visitors a year.

La Lonja viewed from where the brothel used to be