Preservation in the Historical City Center of Goiás (GO) and the World Cultural Heritage: Authenticity or Heritage as Scenery?

This paper presents some conservation practices carried out in recent decades in the city of Goiás (GO), including its recognition by UNESCO in 2001 as a World Heritage Site. The process of preservation of this city, carried out by the Instituto de Patrimônio Histórico e Artístico Nacional (IPHAN), began decades before the international recognition, and shows that initially, the city of Goiás did not clearly belong to the discursive network of national heritage. But at the end of the 1990s, there was an inflection of this discourse, when the city started to demonstrate its “exceptional value” and “authenticity.” Thus, we discuss the construction of this city as World Cultural Heritage and whether the recent actions taken to preserve the city comply with a sense of authenticity or if it is rather the result of some naturalized postures of the national preservation institute that, after all, led to the construction of colonial scenarios through various regions of the country.