Abstract
The inclusion of elements of the natural landscape, particularly abiotic heritage, and cultural heritage, to touristic activity as a result of a more demanding market ultimately provides the rise of geotourism, an integrated activity between geosciences, culture, and history of the place in which they operate. The cemeterial tourism is a part of the urban geotourism now rising in Brazil, wherein observation and analysis of the esthetics and of the georesources used in tombs make many tourists and scholars start to patronize this new touristic niche. Thus, this paper proposes a geotouristic trail in Senhor da Boa Sentenca Cemetery, the oldest at the Paraiba capital, northeastern Brazil, inaugurated in 1856, by mapping the stone materials used in the gravestones, which serve as tools for sociological, architectural, and geosciences studies. Thirteen different types of granites, as well as other types of rocks, have been identified, as well as various architectural styles; the trail can thus be used both by geotourists and scholars from various fields, being the cemetery an open-air museum.
Highlights
The presence of values associated to material or immaterial goods which can be seen in cemeteries make them a reflection of the society to which they belong
Its material assets, like the rocks and the architectonic elements, as well as its high historical and social meaning, make it a very good subject for the study ofknowledge and culture. Encompassing both academic and touristic aspects, the SBCS, the largest cemetery in the state of Paraíba, is an open-air museum, allowing the development of studies in a Geoheritage (2019) 11:1133–1149 number of fields, such as architecture, geology, archeology, and history. It is a museum of petrography, in which researchers and students can find a large variety of rock types, both national and foreign; a museum of different architectural styles; a museum of applied sociology, in which some aspects of the local society in different periods in time can be assessed by the characteristics of the tombs and mausoleums, as well as by the rock material in them utilized
The stones used were classified according to specialized catalogs, which, given the relatively small number of dimension stones available in the market until some decades ago, allow a tentative location to be considered as the possible origin for some of them
Summary
Geotouristic trail in the Senhor da Boa Sentença Cemetery, João Pessoa, State of Paraíba (PB), Northeastern Brazil. Luciano Schaefer Pereira1 & Marcos Antônio Leite do Nascimento2 & Virgínio Mantesso-Neto. Received: 5 April 2018 / Accepted: 10 April 2019 / Published online: 2 May 2019 # The European Association for Conservation of the Geological Heritage 2019
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