diff --git a/scrapy/templates/spiders/basic.tmpl b/scrapy/templates/spiders/basic.tmpl
index 88bdad914..2d3b96e38 100644
--- a/scrapy/templates/spiders/basic.tmpl
+++ b/scrapy/templates/spiders/basic.tmpl
@@ -1,3 +1,4 @@
+# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
 import scrapy
 
 
diff --git a/scrapy/templates/spiders/crawl.tmpl b/scrapy/templates/spiders/crawl.tmpl
index 0702f205f..0482a5496 100644
--- a/scrapy/templates/spiders/crawl.tmpl
+++ b/scrapy/templates/spiders/crawl.tmpl
@@ -1,3 +1,4 @@
+# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
 import scrapy
 from scrapy.contrib.linkextractors import LinkExtractor
 from scrapy.contrib.spiders import CrawlSpider, Rule
diff --git a/scrapy/templates/spiders/csvfeed.tmpl b/scrapy/templates/spiders/csvfeed.tmpl
index 54f2b827a..7e10cd8a8 100644
--- a/scrapy/templates/spiders/csvfeed.tmpl
+++ b/scrapy/templates/spiders/csvfeed.tmpl
@@ -1,3 +1,4 @@
+# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
 from scrapy.contrib.spiders import CSVFeedSpider
 
 from $project_name.items import ${ProjectName}Item
diff --git a/scrapy/templates/spiders/xmlfeed.tmpl b/scrapy/templates/spiders/xmlfeed.tmpl
index d798ce763..a0e26aa14 100644
--- a/scrapy/templates/spiders/xmlfeed.tmpl
+++ b/scrapy/templates/spiders/xmlfeed.tmpl
@@ -1,3 +1,4 @@
+# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
 from scrapy.contrib.spiders import XMLFeedSpider
 
 from $project_name.items import ${ProjectName}Item