Peña Duro

Peña Duro
General Information
Official name:	Peña Duro Prison
Created by:	Denny O'Neil
First Appearance:	The Question (comics)
Galaxy:	Milky Way
Star System:	Sol
Planet:	Earth
Country:	Santa Prisca
State:	Santa Prisca
Locale:	The Caribbean

Peña Duro, is an infamous prison located in Santa Prisca, a caribbean country in the DC Comics universe. It was where the Batman villain known as Bane was born, raised, and eventually addicted to the drug known as Venom.

Referred to by many of its inmates as the armpit of the Earth, Peña Duro was a prison island used to house Santa Prisca's most dangerous criminals. Many considered it as the world's most dangerous prison. Bane was born here to serve the life sentence of his father, and his childhood was spent behind its hellish walls. Though imprisoned, Bane's natural abilities allow him to develop extraordinary skills within the prison's walls. He read as many books as he could get his hands on, built up his body in the prison's gym, and learned to fight in the merciless school of prison life. Despite his circumstances, he appears to have found teachers of various sorts during his incarceration, ranging from hardened convicts to an elderly Jesuit priest, under whose tutelage he apparently receives a classical education. It is here he commits his first murder at the age of eight, stabbing a criminal who wanted to use him to gain information about the prison. During his years in the hellish prison, Bane carried a teddy bear he calls Osito (Spanish for "little bear"), whom he considered his only friend. It is revealed that Osito has a hole in his back to hold a knife that Bane used against anyone who bullied him. Bane ultimately establishes himself as the "king" of Peña Duro. The prison's controllers take note and, eventually, force him to become a test subject for a mysterious drug known as Venom, which had killed all other subjects. It nearly killed him at first, but he survives and finds its effects enhance his physical strength. Years later, Bane escaped Peña Duro, along with several accomplices: Trogg, Zombie, and Bird.

Other Appearances

In The New Batman Adventures video game: Batman: Rise of Sin Tzu, Bane, under the employ of Sin Tzu, has returned to Peña Duro to recruit twelve of the toughest men on the prison island for an 'impossible job that would almost certainly result in their deaths', but promised that if the men completed the mission successfully, they would gain freedom from Peña Duro and have all the riches they could ever imagine. Bane proceeded to turn the inmates on each other with knives, intent on searching out the worthy twelve men in line for the job. Over a hundred of the inmates were dead in minutes, Bane waiting until only twelve men were left, still fighting to the death, he then takes the surviving men and packs them into a crate, and ships them to Gotham City, under the threat of a weapon of mass destruction is stored inside. When Batman takes the crate to the Batcave, the inmates and Bane attack him, but are swiftly defeated. The former inmates of Peña Duro are left by Batman at Stonegate Prison.

Peña Duro is mentioned in Batman: The Enemy Within, as a former prison where Bane and the mercenaries hired by the Pact were kept. It is revealed that the Riddler also briefly held at the prison, only to lead a mass escape from the penitentiary and murder the warden.

The Peña Duro prison is mentioned in the fifth season of the TV series Gotham. It was the prison where Eduardo Dorrance was imprisoned until he was freed by Nyssa al Ghul.