French Guiana

French Guiana is not a country and does not want to be. It is a French department and an outermost region of the European Union, on the north-east shoulder of South America, between Brazil and Suriname. Its people are French citizens, they vote in French elections, they use the euro, the EU flag flies over the prefecture in Cayenne, and the roads carry the same signs as the Dordogne.

It is also 83,534 km² — larger than Austria, larger than Czechia — with about 300,000 people, almost all of them on a narrow coastal strip, and 96% of it is Amazon rainforest. Behind the coast road there is essentially nothing but forest and rivers for four hundred kilometres, and the only way in is by pirogue or light aircraft.

Two things brought the outside world here and both are extraordinary. The first was the bagne — the penal colony that swallowed 70,000 convicts between 1852 and 1953 and killed most of them, and which the world knows through Papillon and Dreyfus. The second, on almost the same coast, is the Guiana Space Centre: because Kourou sits at 5° north, a rocket launched from here gets a free kick from the Earth's rotation, and Europe has been putting its satellites into orbit from a jungle clearing since 1968.

Very few travellers come. There are no beach resorts, the coast is muddy Atlantic rather than Caribbean, prices are French, and the interior is genuinely difficult. What you get in exchange is a place where the EU meets the Amazon, where a rocket launch is a public event, and where you can be in an Amerindian village on a brown river four hours after leaving a supermarket that sells Camembert.

Locally it is simply la Guyane — the French qualifier is for outsiders who might confuse it with Guyana next door but one, or with Suriname, which was Dutch Guiana. The name comes from an Amerindian word usually glossed as "land of many waters", which is exactly right.

A coastal strip and then forest. Almost the entire population lives within a few kilometres of the Atlantic or of the two border rivers, and the rest of the territory — an area the size of Austria — has essentially no roads at all.

Everything a visitor does happens on the coastal road between Saint-Laurent-du-Maroni and Cayenne, plus a boat trip to the Îles du Salut and, if you have time, up one of the rivers. Distances look small and take longer than they should.

French Guiana's history is one long sequence of attempts to make it profitable, almost all of which failed catastrophically, followed by a century of using it as a place to put people France wanted to forget.

In the space of fifteen years French Guiana went from being the place where France disposed of its convicts to the place from which Europe reaches space. The two facilities are 25 km apart, and the second was built partly because the first had left the territory with nothing else.

Europe's spaceport, and the reason most people have heard of French Guiana at all. The Centre Spatial Guyanais occupies about 700 km² of coast and forest near Kourou, and it exists here for one reason: geography.

This is the single best reason to plan a trip around a date, and it is far more accessible than most people assume. Launches are public events, the viewing is free, and the schedule is published months ahead.

For a hundred years French Guiana was where France sent people it wanted to stop thinking about. Around 70,000 convicts arrived between 1852 and 1953 and the majority never left. The remains are extensive, largely unrestored, and the most affecting thing in the territory.

Three small islands 15 km off Kourou — Royale, Saint-Joseph and the famous Île du Diable, Devil's Island. The name means Islands of Salvation and comes from 1763, when survivors of the Kourou catastrophe fled here to escape the mainland fevers. A century later they became the most feared part of the penal system.

The capital, and a genuinely Creole city rather than a French one transplanted. About 65,000 people in the commune and perhaps 150,000 in the wider area — over half the territory's population lives in and around it.

For 300,000 people this is an extraordinarily plural society — probably the most ethnically varied part of the European Union. Roughly half the population was born outside the territory, and a third are foreign nationals, mostly from Suriname, Brazil and Haiti.

Ninety-six per cent of the territory is primary Amazon rainforest, and unlike almost anywhere else in the Amazon basin, most of it has never been logged. This is because there was never enough population, road or economic pressure to reach it — an accident of history that has produced one of the best-preserved tropical forests on the planet.

Jaguar, puma, tapir, giant anteater, giant otter, harpy eagle, black caiman and around 700 bird species. You will not see most of it — this is dense forest and the animals are shy — but the concentration is extraordinary and the accessible sites are very good.

The beaches at Awala-Yalimapo, at the mouth of the Maroni, are one of the world's most important nesting sites for the leatherback turtle — the largest turtle alive, up to 2.5 metres and 900 kg. In a good season several thousand nests are laid on a few kilometres of sand.

The river that is both the Suriname border and the main street of western French Guiana. It runs 520 km, it has no bridge along its entire length, and everything — people, shopping, school, medicine, contraband — moves by pirogue.

The RN1 runs 250 km from Cayenne to Saint-Laurent and is the spine of the territory. Everything a visitor without a plane can reach is on it or just off it, and it is a far better drive than the map suggests — savannah, mangrove, creek crossings and a string of small towns with more history than population.

If the coast is French Guiana's front room, the interior is what the territory actually is: 80,000 km² of forest with a few thousand people in it, reachable by aircraft and river only.

One of the most genuinely mixed cuisines anywhere: Creole at the base, with Amerindian, Maroon, Brazilian, Hmong, Chinese and Lebanese layers, and French technique running through all of it. In Cayenne you can eat a Vietnamese soup for breakfast, a Creole fish stew for lunch and a French tasting menu for dinner, all within a few streets.

This is rum country, and specifically rhum agricole country — distilled from fresh cane juice rather than molasses, which is the French Caribbean method and produces something grassier and sharper than Jamaican or Cuban rum.

French Guiana's carnival is longer, stranger and less touristic than anything in the Caribbean — it runs for two months, from Epiphany on 6 January to Ash Wednesday, and its central figure is unlike any other carnival tradition in the world.

An economy that looks European on paper and behaves like an isolated territory in practice. GDP per head is roughly half the French average but several times that of neighbouring Suriname or Brazil's northern states — which is why the borders are what they are.

Equatorial: hot, humid and consistent, with 25–32 °C all year and humidity that rarely drops below 80%. There is no cool season. What changes is the rain, and it changes a lot.

There is no short way. Prague to Cayenne means Paris and then a long-haul flight across the Atlantic — total journey time 14 to 18 hours with one connection, and it is essentially a domestic French flight at the far end. The time difference is 5 hours behind Czech winter time, 6 in summer.

Expensive, and there is no way around it. This is French pricing at the end of a very long supply chain, in a place with no budget tourism infrastructure. Assume it will cost more than an equivalent trip to mainland France.

French Guiana has a genuinely higher crime rate than mainland France — homicide rates are several times the metropolitan figure — and this is one of the few places in this factbook where the standard advice needs to be taken literally rather than as boilerplate.

A small population, fragile communities and a forest under real pressure. What a visitor does here matters more than in most places, simply because there are so few visitors and so few people.

French Guiana is the strangest place in the European Union and almost nobody goes. You land at an airport named after a black governor from Cayenne who brought Chad over to de Gaulle in 1940, you drive past road signs identical to the ones in Normandy, and within an hour you are looking at a river that has no bridge along five hundred kilometres and that people cross in dugout canoes to go shopping.

The two things it is famous for sit twenty-five kilometres apart and say everything. On one side of the road, the ruins of a penal colony that killed most of the seventy thousand men France sent to it, left to the forest and only now being propped up. On the other, the pad from which Europe launched the James Webb Space Telescope. The same coast, a century apart, and the second was built partly because the first left the place with nothing.

Two pieces of advice. First, go for a launch if you possibly can. It is free, it is public, half of Kourou is on the beach with you, and the sound reaches you twenty seconds after the light in a way no video conveys. Second, get on a river. The coast is the administrative version of this territory; the Maroni is the real one, and half a day in a pirogue tells you more than a week of driving.

And go to Iracoubo. It is a village church on the coast road, unlocked, empty, and painted floor to ceiling by a convict who was given the job by a priest who thought he might as well be useful. It is naive, enormous and completely sincere, and it is the only place in French Guiana where the bagne produced something other than graves.

— Radim Kaufmann