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 values in La Réunion; Jackie Feldman on Jewish-Israelis guiding Christian pilgrims in the Holy Land; Amos Ron and Yotam Lurie on the intimacy and trust in guide -- tourist relations in Israel; Annelou Ypeij, Eva Krah and Floor van der Hout on the impact of gender on guide -- local relations in Peru; Irit Dekel on the manipulation of the past and the present in home museums in Germany; Jonathan Skinner on the imagination and props involved in the re-animation of heritage in a historical fantasy home in the UK. The issue ends with discussion commentaries from Noel Salazar and Erik Cohen that reiterate tour guiding as a particularly temporal and physical mediating pursuit, one which raises critical questions as to the future mechanics of tour guiding and how a performative approach to guiding engages with authenticity and new technologies.