History and Heritage: the portrayal of landscape of the South of Portugal in travel accounts in modern period

Abstract

In the last decades the use of travel accounts and travel guidebooks as historical sources has opened new lines of investigation. The analysis of this sources allows one to study different topics: the history of art and define the concept of heritage at each point in time; the economic history, through their interrelationship with the different means of transport or new industries, which technological and industrial development provided for the travellers/tourists; the social and cultural history, through their interrelationship with the development of leisure, free times and voyage as a mean of pleasure and education. This text will be based on the accounts of journeys in southern Portugal in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, emphasizing the descriptions of landscape and cultural landscape.