Pleasure villégiature and the bourgeoisie culture formation in Poços de Caldas spring water spa city between 1930s and 1940s

Author(s)

Jussara Marques Oliveira Marrichi

• Document type: Doctoral Thesis
• Press: Campinas, SP.
• Institution: Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Instituto de Filosofia e Ciências Humanas
• Defense date: 2015-03-13

Examining board members

Edgar Salvadori De Decca; Marcos Tognon; Ana Aparecida Villanueva Rodrigues; Ademir Gebara; Myrian Bahia Lopes

• Advisor: Edgar Salvadori De Decca

Abstract

During the 1930s, in our country, a new bourgeoisie culture was being settled in the heart of a spring water spa venue that had been designed in the mid-1920s in Europe as a request from Minas Gerais government which aimed to change Poços de Caldas into the first spring water spa city in Brazil. In 1931 three large buildings, that had been designed and built by a commission of well-known doctors, engineers and architects, would be displayed in the national and international scenery as symbols of a civilized and modern place which really represented the following novelty: Poços de Caldas as the first spring water spa city in Latin America. However, the visitors¿ frequency was not as high as the one which made the European spring water cities so lively since the end of the 19th century. This doctoral thesis, therefore, is a historical investigation based on the reading of local press as well as magazines and newspapers with national distribution that allowed us to understand how it was being built in the social imaginary the beginning of a bourgeoisie culture which needed to learn the new ways to use the spring water spa venues to establish themselves as a new group (later desired and copied) that created new behaviors before a hot water civilizatory process in our country which, therefore, contributed to the appearance of new desires in Brazilian elite. Those desires which established the rest villégiature practice in the early 1930s and its transformation into an organized touristic activity were also main factors to the movement of those people who, already in the 1940s, started valuing new behaviors which were later gradually contributing to the weakening of that kind of spring water spa city in the modern history of leisure travel in our country (AU)