I know you probably got here from googling “how to say tour in Spanish” so I’ll be very brief here and just get you the answer you want. Unlike English which uses one word for both of these things, Spanish has two different words depending on what kind of tour you’re talking about: “un tour” and “una gira”. Also, it bears clarifying what “giro” means because that’s also a word in Spanish which means something completely different and you don’t want to confuse them. I shall provide memory aids along the way to help you remember which words refer to what.
“Un tour”: bus tour, guided tour, sightseeing tour, etc.
That’s what “un tour” is. It’s (obviously) a loanword they took from English. There’s really no other word used for this to the best of my knowledge, and it’s the same throughout the Spanish-speaking world (Spain and Latin America, in other words). This is very simple to remember and I don’t think we need any memory aids or mnemonics here, though I have included an image to illustrate for you on the left.
“Una gira”: a series of performances by an artist in different locations
This is the “to go on tour” kind of tour, like what a musician, band, or theater group would do. Very easy to remember: “Shakira hace una gira” (“Shakira” and “gira” rhyme, I’ll give you pronunciation help in a minute), which is Spanish for “Shakira does a tour”. It’s also how you would say that someone is “on tour”, so “Shakira hace una gira” could also be translated as “Shakira is on tour”. “Hacer”, for those who don’t know, means “to do”, and “hace” is the third-person, present, indicative form of the verb. Here are pronunciations of “Shakira”, “hace”, and “gira” by native Spanish speakers if you need help with that:
“Shakira”:
“Hace”, Spanish (from Spain) pronunciation (the “c” is pronounced differently in Spain than elsewhere):
“Hacer”, Latin American pronunciation:
“Gira”:
Bonus, “Hacer una gira” (“to do a tour” or “to go on tour”):
If you’re learning Spanish…
There’s a great service called Yabla (this is my review of them) that takes popular media like TV shows and short video clips in the language you’re learning (they offer several) and embeds the video in a special platform specifically designed to help students learning that language do so from that video. You get subtitles in both the language spoke and your native language, you can click on any word in the subtitles to see a definition of it and have it automatically added to your flashcards they provide for you to review later what you learned, you can have quizes and games based on the language used in the video, etc. It’s really good, check out their site here or, again, you can see my review of them here.
Also, I wrote a book about how to learn Spanish from popular media (movies, TV shows, music, etc.) that you can get on Amazon in Kindle or paperback format. If that interests you and especially if you’d like to support my work, I’d really appreciate if you could check it out here on Amazon, it’s called The Telenovela Method.
Hope that helps, please consider subscribing to my emails (sidebar on the right) or at least push notifications for when I put up new blog posts. My social media accounts are on the slidey thing on the left (I’m active on YouTube, Instagram, Tiktok, Pintrest, Facebook, and Twitter).
Cheers,
Andrew
