Resumo: The present article analyses Germany’s historical path that led to the self-proclaimed title of world champion in travel and tourism. It discusses the material and psychological conditions that determined the development of a mentality especially prone to travel; it also revisits German traditional tourist destinations, focusing, in particular, on the strong tourist German presence in Portugal over the last decades. German tourism is then related, in the light of a symbolic geography, to the construction of the space-myth (Schields, 1991) which was the first European holiday model: the Mediterranean. The article analyses how the European Mediterranean South became a privileged tourist destination and how Portugal appeared on that stage of the (northern) tourist imagination, marked by the mythological density of a ‘warm and bright South’, an idea of enormous relevance in the first tourist movements and still powerfully valid in contemporaneity.
