Tourism, although still considered a developing field of study, centres its epistemology on the human being, who departs from his/her everyday life to engage in the subjective phenomenon of traversing globalized territories. Within this broad spectrum, dark tourism emerges as a global phenomenon in which numerous people travel to explore a wide range of places, monuments, and attractions that offer (re)presentations of death and suffering. Dark tourism refers to journeys made to locations associated with the memory of death, destruction, and catastrophic events. Dark tourism is now recognized as a multidisciplinary area of study, encompassing archaeology, heritage studies, and tourism, all of which aim to capture contemporary (re)presentations of death. It is a field of study that allows us to examine cultural, historical, and political issues, as well as deepen our sociological understanding of death, the deceased, and collective memory. 

In recent years, dark tourism has become a global phenomenon, leading many people to shun traditional tourist destinations in favour of visiting former concentration camps, war zones, sites of major tragedies, cemeteries, and more. These factors lead dark tourism to defy the simplistic definition of tourism as a form of leisure/enjoyment travel. Thus, it can be said that dark tourism, in its various forms, provides visual meanings and a multiplicity of senses regarding landscapes that bear witness to tragedies and atrocities. These are places where tourists can evoke feelings of compassion and empathy for the victims or feelings of questioning and outrage about the contextualized historical events. 

The municipality of Brumadinho, a city located in the Metropolitan Region of Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais, had a tailings dam situated approximately 18 kilometres from the city centre, built by the mining company Vale S.A. to contain the tailings from the Córrego do Feijão mine. On January 25, 2019, the dam of the mine ruptured, resulting in over 270 victims and spreading 12 million cubic metres of waste into the Paraopeba River basin. 

The Memorial of the Victims of Brumadinho is a tribute to the victims of that accident. The project aims to resist the erasure of history, in honour of the 272 victims of the tragedy, and to prevent similar incidents from happening again. The space offers sensitive, individual, and collective experiences, aiming to prevent the process of forgetting the entire tragedy and suffering that took place on the site. The memorial ensures an experience for visitors, always reminding them of the tragedy through accounts, memories, and opportunities for reflection. The project emerged in 2019 as an idea of AVABRUM (Association of Relatives and Affected by the Rupture of the Córrego do Feijão Mine Dam), and it was also a demand from Vale S.A. to honour those who lost their lives in the dam collapse. In this context, the objective of the present study is to examine the relationship between the Memorial of the Victims of Brumadinho, MG, and dark tourism and dark heritage.