It is almost impossible to think of any natural space on earth which has not been written about: ‘everywhere we look we encounter a pre-interpreted landscape, or a landscape made legible’, as Jonathan Smith has argued. Tropical landscapes, in particular, are cultural as well as natural constructs – spaces both real and imaginary which have inspired utopian fiction, visual art, and countless sensationalist travel accounts. Within a European literary tradition key places within the tropics such as ‘Amazonia’ have often been reduced to little more than discursive constructs, conceived variously as lands of promise and adventure or as green hells of disease and savagery. David Arnold has compared Western attitudes and ideas about the tropics – what he terms ‘tropicality’ – to Said's definition of ‘Orientalism’. Just as representations of the Orient in European art and letters have centred on the region's dissimilarity to the Occident, so has the tropics been understood as embodying all that the ‘temperate’ zone is not. In Tristes Tropiques Claude Lévi-Strauss exemplifies the pervasiveness of stereotypes of the tropics as ‘radically different’: