This special issue of Ethnologia Europaea focuses on tour guides as cultural mediators. It opens with a discussion of tour guiding in the anthropology of tourism by Jackie Feldman and Jonathan Skinner and consideration of how tour guiding should be seen as imaginative and performative practice. This is illustrated by a highly international and comparative collection by leading anthropologists and ethnologists, many of whom have guiding experience themselves: Valerio Simoni on intimacy, informality and sexuality in guiding relations in Cuba; David Picard on modern guiding and traditional...