Social Space of Health and Health Tourism: The Children’s Bathing Colony O Século

This article aims to understand the process of institutionalisation of the social configuration of a bathing colony aimed at lower-class children, promoted by the leaders of the newspaper O Século in the early twentieth century. A perspective that conceptually relates to the social space of health and tourism was favoured. Health is a cultural construction – as a notion – and a political construction – as a space – that can be apprehended relationally, as a product of the social world. In the conceptualisation of tourism, mobility and leisure are central (although not exclusive) axes, understood as dynamic phenomena and concepts, taking on various forms and multiple meanings according to sociohistorical contexts. The paper seeks to demonstrate that the institution of the bathing colony was socially defined, with specific individuals and groups being decisive in this process.