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Karen Ann Higgs (born 1 January 1966) is a British travel guide author who specialises in Uruguay.

She created the Guru'Guay website in 2013. She has written and published two guidebooks The Guru'Guay Guide to Montevideo and The Guru'Guay Guide to Uruguay: Beaches, Ranches and Wine Country.

The Guru'Guay website has been praised as 'a very sophisticated concierge site' by Le Figaro and 'an excellent resource for English speakers' by the Lonely Planet. The second edition of the Montevideo Guide was sponsored by the Uruguay Tourism Ministry and the Government of Montevideo. The audiobook to Montevideo was endorsed by the Government of Montevideo.

Karen has been cited as Uruguay’s English language travel and living expert by the New York Times, National Geographic and others and on travel podcasts including Extra Pack of Peanuts. She has been called one of Uruguay’s top influencers and “the voice of Uruguay’s expats”.

Early life
Karen Higgs was born on 1 January 1966 in Newport, South Wales. Her family moved to Maesycwmmer in the South Wales Valleys when she was eight years old.

Career
Karen taught English as a foreign language as a way to travel the world after leaving university. She lived and worked in Costa Rica (1989-91) and Buenos Aires, Argentina (1992-1995). After time in Europe, she moved with her family to Washington DC where she began designing websites in 1997 with clients like the Pan American Health Organisation.

In 1999, she joined the Association for Progressive Communications and moved to Uruguay in 2000 where she was director of communications until December 2011.

She entered tourism in 2010 when she and her husband opened Casa Sarandi, a small guesthouse in including TripAdvisor Travelers Choice multiple years and was a Lonely Planet Top Choice. Karen closed the guesthouse in March 2020 to focus full-time on Guru'Guay.

Personal life
Karen has performed under the name Karen Ann as a professional singer and founded a world music duo with Uruguayan composer and guitarist Jorge Galemire in 2005. The duo took the name Trelew in 2007 and released an eponymous album, Trelew, in 2009 which was nominated for the Premios Graffiti, the national Uruguayan music awards, in 2010. Later, Karen Ann went on to record a second Trelew album called Mantras Celtas in 2013 with multi-instrumentalist and singer, Mariana Padron.