This essay focuses on travel literature about Brazil, written during the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with the intention of drawing from this small sample, an image that was built of nature and the moral conduct of the people in the tropics - specially the erotic life of Brazilians and its relationship with the pleasures of the flesh. It is therefore a very limited attempt to map a small part of the truths about Brazil and its people that the Europeans had shared and built over the centuries, truths that largely had guided their actions in that part of the globe.
colonial habits; travel literature; travelers; colonial erotica; perspectives of tropical nature.