In this thesis we consider a family of Riemannian manifolds, not necessarily complete, with curvature conditions in a neighborhood of a ray. Under these conditions we obtain that the essential spectrum of the Laplace operator contains an interval. The results presented in this thesis allow to determine the spectrum of the Laplace operator on unlimited regions of space forms, such as horoball in hyperbolic space and cones in Euclidean space. Also construct an example that shows the need of global conditions on the supreme sectional curvature outside a ball, so that the variety has no essential spectrum.Neste trabalho, provaremos alguns resultados sobre espectro essencial de uma classe de variedades Riemannianas, não necessariamente completas...