A construction of tourist landscapes in the diamond path

Abstract

When retaking occupations and traces of the past, tourism can simultaneously retrieve (in)capacities and conflicts ever-present in the places. In order to demonstrate this thesis, was taken as objects of study two historical centers situated in the old Caminho dos Diamantes (Diamond Path), the districts of Milho Verde and São Gonçalo. The Caminho dos Diamantes is one of three routes that formed the Estrada Real (Royal Road). These localities, great producers of diamonds in the XVIIth and XVIIIth centuries, by the end of the mining period, presented distinct landscapes. These localities, forsaken for over a century as a result of the economic exhaustion forced upon the North of Minas Gerais, were rediscovered by tourism in the last decades of the XXth Century. The results of the research show that tourism in Milho Verde regained the old Diamond Path as a conductor of new unsustainable processes that had been established there. In São Gonçalo, the type of tourism established regained the old Path as a tourist attraction, restoring the potentialities that historically made the locality a place of qualified landscape. The methodological framework of this research has been centered on the landscape as the main category of perception and analysis of the phenomena.