Pictorial device designed in the eighteenth century, the local color has expanded its original scope for the pictorial field and begins to compose the production of historians, writers and travelers. Its use in textual media develops and enhances the visual dimension of the narrative and can be considered as a modern expression of the ancient associations between color and word, narrative and painting. The purpose of this thesis is to investigate the use of local color in different discursive types, especially in the works of José de Alencar and Euclides da Cunha, stressing the implicit visual dimension to the narrative device. In order to understand the narrative investment in visuality it is worthed to recover from antiquity the ways of seeing and make see that includes topoi as the ut pictura poesis and ut pictura historia, resources like sunopsis and enargeia, and expedients as, among others, the autopsia and ekphrasis. The initial hypothesis of this thesis is that the local color expresses these modes and features and therefore is able to reproduce and redevelop, in modern times, the visual desire through narrative. The search for ways of seeing and make see requires, as related themes that pervade this study, the consideration of the status and the importance attributed to the vision as a cognitive element and proving, beyond the relations between subject and object in the constitution of knowledge. The fictional writings of Alencar and factual writings of Euclides allow then to demonstrate both the extent of the narrative device, employed in various discursive types, as the variations related to its use, that is how the delimitation of a particular landscape changes the contents of the form of the local color.