Hydrogen technology has been greatly increased in last decades as a promising solution to protect the environment. When carbon-based feedstocks are used, such as natural gas, biomass and biogas, the water gas shift reaction (WGSR) plays an important step in the production of high pure hydrogen for several purposes. By this reaction, the residual carbon monoxide in the gaseous stream (coming from steam reforming of carbonbased feedstocks) can be converted to carbon dioxide and then removed from the stream, avoiding the poisoning of industrial metallic catalysts as well as of electrocatalysts in fuel cells. Aiming to obtain no toxic catalysts that can replace the commercial chromium-doped hematite catalysts, lanthanum-doped hematite was studied in this work. Iron oxide-based samples with different amounts of lanthanum (La/Fe (molar) = 0.02; 0.08 and 0.2) were obtained by sol-gel method and calcined at 600 degrees C. The catalysts were characterized by X-ray diffraction, specific surface area measurements, temperature programmed reduction, Raman spectroscopy, Mossbauer spectroscopy, transmission electron microscopy and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy. It was found that lanthanum affected the textural and reducing properties of hematite, depending on the amount. Moreover, lanthanum oxide increased the activity of hematite by decreasing the size of hematite crystals and then increasing the number of exposed active sites. In addition, lanthanum favored hematite reduction to produce magnetite (active phase). The activity increased with the amount of lanthanum in solids, the lanthanum-richest sample being the most active catalyst.