Tourist imaginary in the Portuguese Estado Novo

Abstract

In 1940 António Ferro told a group of tourism professionals, who were visiting the Official Bureau of Propaganda that Portugal was an impressive exhibition of national tourism. As such, anyone willing to build the ideal country of tourism would just need to prepare a “picturesque diorama of Portugal” (Ferro, 1948: 36). Those statements recall the several initiatives developed by Ferro, the main responsible for the architecture and the spreading to the image of Portugal, also as a tourism destination, between 1933 and 1949. This article aims at showing how the strategies for representing Portugal during the implementation of the nationalizing political regime called Estado Novo insisted on the displaying of a simultaneously homogeneous and heterogeneous nation. That clearly ideological purpose would constrain even more the shaping of tourism destinations which would therefore borrow on a kind of artificiality similar to the one present in Marc Augé’s non-places.