El Prohibido...

While in Cuenca, a local friend promised to take my friend, her boss and I to a bar like none other, called El Prohibido. I wondered how a place could merit such a name, "The Prohibited" - a bit hyperbolic, ¿no?

On our first attempt the bar was closed. The entryway was disguised in a mural of figures of fantasy, holes were carved out in the wall and filled with tiny mutant figures, a crying baby angel, two twisted dog-men, a Medusa head with all her curls hung over the entry way...our friend rang a bell and about a minute later, a barred window cracked open, and a man appeared to tell us the place was not open. Dolores, my friend's 60 + year-old boss declared it an intriguing site worthy of a return visit.

The next night we ventured into the Prohibited and I, for one, was moderately aghast by its hyperbolic fanfare - every inch was filled with some far-beyond-gothic, sudo-sacrilegious detail: dark oil paintings of women making love to demons or in ecstasy with snakes, altars of baby dolls with their eyes poked out and scalps filled with pins, chandeliers of human skulls and rib bones, smiling bathroom dwarfs with enlarged vein-laced penises - the satanic interpretation of baroque.