Paper short abstract:

This paper aims contribute to the public policies regarding Brazilian cultural heritage preservation, with special focus on tourism development in heritage cities, subject with which I have worked since the finish of my doctoral thesis.

Paper long abstract:

The creation of a Brazilian national heritage, starting with the establishment of the National Historical and Artistic Heritage Service ("Serviço do Patrimônio Histórico e Artístico Nacional"), in 1937, was part of a wider process of the construction of a Brazilian national identity. The work of the agency led to the conservation of urban sites which, particularly from the 1960s onwards, were converted into areas dedicated to the development of commercial tourism. In such areas, the transformation of natural, historical and local cultural characteristics into elements of the sale of tourism as a product is apparent, and there has been a convergence of the views expressed by conservationists and those expressed by the representatives of the tourism trade. The views expressed present tourism as the solution to many of the problems inherent to the conservation of individual buildings and sites which are considered to be local, national or world heritage. In order to analyze this process we shall examine documentation produced by SPHAN and UNESCO in the period between the years 1937 and 1988, including reports, inventories, correspondence, photos, and journals, legislation, regulations and international agreements and printed guides of heritage cities