When you ask any spanish person what a guiri is, you always receive, more or less, the same answer. The word ‘guiri’ is not in the oficial spanish dictionary (the RAE, Spanish Royal Academy of Language) but everybody uses the term to name this huge amount of North Europeans who are coming here looking for sun, beach and party.
Whether you feel like fitting in this description or you are simply a curious person, you may have wondered how this funny word, guiri, entered the Spanish vocabulary to define such a group of people, or where does it come from.
Well, this is a difficult intríngulis. The more credible origin is situated on the 19th century. Guiri was the name used by carlists during the civil war to designate the supporters of Queen Cristina (cristinos), and subsequently all the liberals. Basques called the cristinos guiristinos, and although there is no evidence for this particular example, this does seem feasible. Following this hypotesis, the first guiris were probably French and English, regarding the involvement that they had in the war, mainly on the liberal side. So the term guiri was coined to apply to northerners. Nowadays, the French are commonly called gabachos or franchutes, and the term guiri has been extended to European foreigners that don’t speak Spanish, I mean, anglophones (North Americans are included). This teory is reinforced by literature. Galdós the writer explains that the Royal Guard of Queen Cristina (Guardia Real de Infantería) used to be called guiris because they had three letters, G.R.I, on their caps and cartridge cases.
On the other hand, the word could come from the term guirigay (or guirigall in catalan) which means firstly “language dark and difficult to understand” (could English fit?) and secondly a lot of people talking or shouting at the same time. Eureka! It really fits with guiris! At least with the ones that we don’t like… and that’s the point, sometimes the term is negative, but with some other ones it has not connotations.
Anyway, the term remained sleeping in the collective mind till the sixties, when hordes of tourists invaded Spain with white socks to their knees. They came, and they come, of countries where solar protection has not yet been invented, and while they, los guiris, are red as crabs and exposed their face of ‘idiots’, they, las guiris, were sexys and liberal blondes. A paradise for the local Iberian macho. Even some people believe that guiri comes from the evolution of “girl”, due to this circumstance.
Another possible origin comes from Welsh, where ‘gwr’ means man. The word could have arrived to Spain along with British mining expertise at the turn of the 19th century. The Welsh miners used to call each other gwr and became known by locals as guiris. After that, it was used to stigmatize everything that was foreign, new, or imposed.
There are many other teories about the origin of the word guiri, some of them quite imaginative, as those that affirm that it comes from “where is?” or from “get it!”, this last one supposedly what the English retailers who resided in the Canary Islands in 19th century oftenly said to their servants, and for that reason were called guiris by them (also chonis, from the pronuntiation of Johnny a la española).
Finally, I must say that in Turkish guiri means ‘exit’, and in japanese, ‘debt of honor’, ‘duty’ or ‘obligation’. A part from that, there are many different types of guiris, but this is another story that I’ll tell you… another day.
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