25 Aug, 2018 @ 15:58
1 min read

Woman threatened with €600,000 fine for offering tours of her village in Spain

vilafames
Vilafames, Valencia
Vilafames, Valencia

A TOUR guide app has called in lawyers after a woman was threatened with a €600,000 fine for offering guided tours of her Spanish village.

Susana Meseguer, 50, was making up to €60 per month by using the app GuruWalk and by posting small ads for tours in local shops.

Meseguer, who lives in Vilafames in Valencia, signed up to GuruWalk, which connects tourists to tour guides, when she lost her job in May.

But the Valencia government has now sent her a letter demanding she cease all tour guiding activity as she lacks authorisation, and that if she continues she could face a fine of between €100,000 and €600,000.

“We are currently with our lawyers to solve this issue,” a GuruWalk spokesman told the Olive Press: “but the amount of the fine looks disproportionate to us.”

Official tour guide groups argue GuruWalk – a Valencia-based site – is degrading the profession.

Meseguer, 50, told El Pais that she has found ‘her place in the world in Vilafamés’, but has succumbed to the pressure and left the GuruWalk platform and removed her adverts from around the town.


She added: “I was not doing tours from 9am to 9pm every day, as they said, it was a sporadic thing, some weekends, as a hobby, because I love my village.

“I liked the walks where I would explain information and tell stories, and I would always warn that I was not an official guide. The most I ever made was around €60 in one month. If they had called me I would have cleared everything up, but they never did.”

She also claims that the town hall knew what she was doing, and that the tourist office had even sent her groups when staff couldn’t leave their post.

It comes as other platforms such as Uber and Airbnb have been met with much resistance from authorities across Spain.

Laurence Dollimore

Laurence Dollimore is a Spanish-speaking, NCTJ-trained journalist with almost a decade’s worth of experience.
The London native has a BA in International Relations from the University of Leeds and and an MA in the same subject from Queen Mary University London.
He earned his gold star diploma in multimedia journalism at the prestigious News Associates in London in 2016, before immediately joining the Olive Press at their offices on the Costa del Sol.
After a five-year stint, Laurence returned to the UK to work as a senior reporter at the Mail Online, where he remained for two years before coming back to the Olive Press as Digital Editor in 2023.
He continues to work for the biggest newspapers in the UK, who hire him to investigate and report on stories in Spain.
These include the Daily Mail, Telegraph, Mail Online, Mail on Sunday and The Sun and Sun Online.
He has broken world exclusives on everything from the Madeleine McCann case to the anti-tourism movement in Tenerife.

GOT A STORY? Contact newsdesk@theolivepress.es or call +34 951 273 575 Twitter: @olivepress

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