Resumo: There are many difficulties to measure tourism. Among them is the intrinsic difficulty to define tourism, the fact that tourists usually take part in several different economic activities and the fact that often residents also participate in these activities. This paper aims at describing the evolution of tourism in Brazil by looking at the changes on the economic activities considered touristic in each period. The reason for doing that is to avoid the difficulties described above and make the measure of tourism in Brazil more precise. We also compare some data on the contribution of tourism to the Brazilian economy.
