The Paradise night club, touted as the largest brothel in Europe, has opened for business after a Spanish town failed to stop it in the courts. Police patrolled the roads outside the Spanish town of La Jonquera and 15 security guards kept watch as the opening night crowd filtered in on Thursday. The frontier town in Catalonia is one of the few that has dared to fight back against Spain's growing brothel industry. Do you call that exploitation?
Roughly 1, prostitutes reportedly sell their services there. And many local restaurant owners and other residents are pleased with the business they attract. Except for a handful of local priests, few Spaniards have attempted to throw cold water on this industry. But the mayor of La Jonquera, Jordi Cabezas, refused to give the club an operating licence, claiming that a police report warned the brothel could cause "security and public order" problems. The club owner, identified as Jose Moreno in the Spanish press, had been arrested in September, along with 40 other people, in connection with an alleged sex trade trafficking ring.
He was charged and released pending trial. Police believe that the ring lured the women from Brazil and forced them into prostitution at his other night spots. Mr Moreno has denied involvement with trafficking rings. Who would think that I would get involved in something like that? It doesn't make sense," he told El Pais newspaper. Mr Moreno took the town to court and won. In February, the Supreme Court of Catalonia ruled that police speculation was not sufficient grounds to dampen the libido of paying customers.
The ruling was not surprising in Spain, a traditionally Catholic country that has long tolerated prostitution. During the year dictatorship of General Francisco Franco, the sex trade served as an escape valve for the sexual energies of generations of men, frustrated by the rigid sexual mores of the time. Few women were in a position to object to this double standard: after all, under Franco, divorce was out of the question, and women couldn't even open a bank account or hold a passport without their husband's permission.
With the advent of democracy in the late s, one might have expected prostitution go the way of those little books of fascist party propaganda. But, after decades of taboos, Spaniards did not fancy a new prohibition, especially concerning hard-won sexual freedom. In Spain, prostitution today is not illegal, though making money off the between-the-sheets sweat of others is.
