If you are like most of our readers – even the well-traveled ones – you know very little about the Guianas. We’re talking about Guyana (formerly British Guyana), Suriname (formerly Dutch Guyana), and French Guiana (formerly French Guyana). The geographical region includes the east of Venezuela (formerly Spanish Guyana) and the northwest of Brazil too (formerly Portuguese Guyana). We’ve been hanging out in the region lately, so we thought we’d share some of what we’ve learned.
- When you look at a map you will see that they are part of South America. But only geographically, because they are culturally part of the Caribbean. Indeed, the headquarters of Caricom, the Caribbean Community, is in Georgetown, Guyana.
2. Guyana has been independent since 1966, Suriname since 1975. But French Guiana is an overseas department of France (the largest one, as a matter of fact). The people of Suriname had the option of adopting Surinamese or Dutch citizenship, which led to huge migrations to the Netherlands in the seventies.
3. The Guianas are mostly jungle, like over 90%. In fact, pretty much everywhere but the coasts is Amazon rainforest, and most of that is primary rainforest (with little or no human intervention). Which means they contain jaguars, caimans, giant anteaters, capybaras, sloths, tapirs, agoutis, giant river otters, monkeys, snakes, lizards, turtles, frogs (some poisonous!) and birds and butterflies like nobody’s business. Not to mention thousands of trees and plants, about half of which exist nowhere else (including the rarest orchids in the world).
4. And the Guianas are very sparsely populated: Guyana has about 800k people, Suriname (the smallest country in South America) 600k, and French Guiana 300k. Nearly all of the population of each lives along the coast, and about half in each capital (which are: Georgetown, Paramaribo, and Cayenne).
5. Speaking of cayenne, and other things to eat, the Demerara river, which gave its name to the sugar once harvested here, runs through Guyana. But people have lived in the Guianas for at least five thousand years, starting with the Arawak and Carib peoples. Columbus spotted them in 1498, Sir Walter Raleigh explored them in the late sixteenth century, and the Dutch and English, then the French, colonised them, with regular attacks from the Spanish and Portuguese.
6. Those sugar plantations required a lot of labour. So did the coffee, cocoa, and cotton plantations. The colonisers enslaved and deported West Africans by the thousands. And later, masses of indentured workers from India, Indonesia, China, Japan, and Laos. We had a guide whose father was African, and whose mother was Japanese and Indonesian. Across the region, people of Indian descent and people of African descent are the two largest ethnic groups (more of the former in Guyana and many more of the latter in French Guiana; about equal in Suriname).
There are also Maroon communities in the interior of all three countries. (Maroons are descendants of African slaves who escaped, fled to the jungle, and built villages.) French Guiana has a Laotian and Hmong community ever since the unrest there in the 1970s, and populations from regions in the Caribbean that speak the same language (e.g. Martinique, Haiti, etc.).
7. All of this human diversity, incidentally, explains why we’ve been keen to get to the Guianas for decades: we love interesting food! The cuisine is a mix of African (okra, palm oil, peanuts), Asian (noodles, soy sauce), and South American (cassava, plantain), and it is just as splendid as we had anticipated. More on this soon, obviously.
8. Linguistically, the Guianas are also complex: their official languages are English, Dutch, and French, but there are multiple other Creole and indigenous languages spoken.
9. The area is also rich in natural resources, especially bauxite, gold, and natural latex. In 2019, oil reserves were discovered off the coast of Guyana, which has given it a rapidly increasing GDP. Suriname has some of the purest drinking water reserves in the world.
10. That said, wealth tends to fall along ethnic lines, with very uneven distribution. Georgetown in particular is a dangerous city, with street crime rampant. Inflation and endemic poverty are problems in all three countries.
11. If you have heard of these places, it’s likely for one of three reasons. (1) The most (in)famous place in Guyana is Jonestown, site of the death of 909 people in 1978, all of whom drank the kool-aid. [Not actually: some were injected with poison, and many who drank it were coerced.] French Guiana is home to (2) Devil’s Island, a penal colony for French political prisoners, and (3) the Guiana Space Center.
12. Christianity (both Catholic and Protestant) is the most prevalent religion in the Guianas, with Hinduism a distant second and Islam an even more distant third. Paramaribo hosts a mosque and a synagogue right next door to one another.
13. The whole region is ideal for eco-tourism but, so far, not exactly ready for it. You can get where you want to go, but it takes a lot of effort. Tour companies don’t always explain things well, and are prone to changing dates on you. (But it’s worth the effort!)
14. Suriname and Guyana are the only two countries in mainland South America where you drive on the left (thanks to British influence). French Guiana has the longest-lasting Carnival celebrations in the world, which include dragon parades by the Chinese community.
15. This is the tropics! There are rainy seasons and dry seasons, but the temperature is in the low thirties (= low nineties) year-round, and humidity is normally above 80%. Climate change has resulted in more extreme temperatures and unusually dry rivers.
We hope this list of fun facts about the Guianas was both informative and entertaining. Stay tuned for much more on the three areas!
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