Tourism launched a new way of traveling: a pleasure trip, with many features of the old maritime, religious and business trips. Marked at the beginning by an educational and therapeutic component, leisure and the desire to escape became the main motivations of tourists, those new travelers: “car enfin je voyage non pour connaître l’Italie, mais pour me faire plaisir”, as Stendhal wrote in 1817. Invented in Europe for over two centuries, tourism is now a global phenomenon that responds to different motivations, has a plurality of forms and handles approximately a billion tourists. On the other hand, the recent extension of the notion of heritage and culture has opened new paths to cultural tourism which today ranges between 37-70% of global tourism (depending on the definition of cultural tourism and motivations of tourists).

 

The attractiveness of places, although accompanied by a complex relationship with the phenomena of 'serial reproduction' of cultural icons, lies largely in its historical and cultural singularity. In fact, at different scales - countries, regions, cities, villages - tourist destinations seek to attract visitors by appealing to an identity based on history and culture, whose reconstruction and recreation have become ordinary.

 

In this tourist marking process, literature played a pioneering role in the "invention" and consecration of places, creating landscapes to be admired. By choosing the destination of your trip, the tourist is influenced by texts - novels, poetry, travel narratives, tourist guides - the stories and the images which circulate among friends, the media and, increasingly, the internet.

 

This colloquium is the third in a series that began in France (November 29 - December 1, 2012, at the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle-Paris 3) and had the second edition in Brazil (16-18 October 2013 in Niterói and Rio de Janeiro). From different fields of knowledge such as Literature, History and Geography, we aim to contribute to the interdisciplinary dialogue on the origins, manifestations and models of cultural tourism in Brazil, France and Portugal by focussing the reflection on travel, landscape and heritage.