Santillana del Mar (Santander) - interior capital.

Cantabria in Northern Spain has a rich assortment of amazing depictions of lust and lechery. Two Collegiate churches especially feature such carvings - presumably for the education of the student priests - at Santillana and at Cervatos to the south in Palencia. The larger carvings at Santillana are on interior capitals and concentrate impressively on the phallus, while at Cervatos, close on 100 exterior corbels (plus some exterior capitals) feature exhibitionist acrobats and apes, megaphallic men and coupling beasts and humans (both hetero- and homo-sexual).

It is possible that the 12th century 'Reconquest' of most of Northern Spain and Portugal involved a great deal of raping and looting. On the other hand, the number of megaphallic, circumcised apes (often yoked or chained) clearly indicates the usual dreary Christian triumphalism over Islam.

The acrobatic female and megaphallic male below are two of the corbels at Cervatos.

The illustrations on this page come from Románico Erótico en Cantabria (1988) by Ángel del Olmo García (Licenciado en geografía e historia) and Basilio Vara Verano (Médico-sexólogo), whose bibliography includes no book published outside Spain.