The Spatial Dimension of Tourism in Geographic Science

Tourism is one of the most significant spatial practices in the services sector, representing a main and/or complementary economic activity in many countries, regions, and cities around the world. The spatial dimension of tourism, as one of those that make up geographic space, results from the relational set of objects and actions of specific agents, such as tourists, the market, planners, and territorial promoters, for example. Therefore, the general objective of this article is to present reflections on tourist practice as an object of study in geographic science. The methodology was a bibliographic review focused on the geography of tourism, especially Rodrigues [38, 41, 39, 40], Cruz [16] and Silva [46], who highlight the contributions of geography to investigate the tourist phenomenon in its spatial complexity. The approach is justified, as geography is the science of lived space. Reading tourism through geography enables the epistemological understanding of the appropriate space, produced, and consumed in/by tourism.