One year prior to the Notre-Dame fire, the National Museum of Brazil in Rio de Janeiro, the largest natural history museum in Latin America, also was caught in a blaze. International reactions to the losses incurred in the conflagration and investments in reconstruction were fewer and markedly less enthusiastic than those that accompanied the Notre-Dame case. The fire was described as “an announced tragedy.” Although the loss for cultural heritage has been estimated to be more extensive than at Notre-Dame, the Brazilian building has yet to be restored and the search for remnants of historical objects lost to the blaze continues amid governmental cuts to science and education, not to mention broad national and international neglect. Comparing the aftermath of the two fires, Samuel Breslow notes that “the loss of Latin American cultural heritage simply does not capture the world’s attention the way the loss of Western European cultural heritage does.”5 The disparate reactions of the international community to these two fires reveal the contested geographies and political nature of what counts as heritage, for whom, and how. It also speaks to how tourism mobilizes or precludes the formation of collective and state responses to disaster.