Guyana

Guyana is 214,969 km² — nearly three times Czechia — with about 830,000 people, which gives it one of the lowest population densities on Earth. It sits on the north-east shoulder of South America between Venezuela, Brazil and Suriname, and it is the only country on the continent whose official language is English.

That is the first thing to understand: Guyana is geographically South American and culturally Caribbean. It is a founding member of CARICOM, whose secretariat is in Georgetown; it plays cricket for the West Indies; its food, music, politics and creole all belong to the Anglophone Caribbean. Spanish is a foreign language here, and Brazil, 1,000 km of forest away, is further from most Guyanese lives than Trinidad is.

The country divides sharply in two. About 90% of the population lives on a coastal strip a few kilometres wide, much of it below sea level at high tide and kept dry by a 280-kilometre sea wall and a Dutch drainage system of dams, canals and sluices that has been maintained for three hundred years. Behind that strip lies the other Guyana: eighty-five per cent forest cover, one of the highest in the world, plus savanna, tepui-topped highlands and rivers on a scale that has to be seen.

And since 2015 there has been a third Guyana. ExxonMobil's Stabroek Block discoveries — now more than eleven billion recoverable barrels — turned a country with a GDP per head of around six thousand dollars into, for several years running, the fastest-growing economy in the world. Georgetown is a building site, the traffic is impossible, prices have jumped, and the argument about what to do with the money is the only conversation anyone is really having.

The name is Amerindian and is usually glossed as "land of many waters" — a description that survives contact with the place better than most etymologies. Guyana has more than a thousand kilometres of navigable river, three of them (the Essequibo, Demerara and Berbice) large enough to have given their names to the colony's three counties and, through them, to a sugar and a rum.

The country's own description of itself is the "Land of Six Peoples", and the national motto is One People, One Nation, One Destiny — both of them aspirations as much as descriptions, since Guyanese politics has run along ethnic lines for seventy years. The six are Amerindian, African, Indian, Portuguese, Chinese and European, and every one of them arrived, or was brought, in a distinct historical episode that the country can date precisely.

Guyana runs in bands from the Atlantic inland. First a coastal plain 15 to 60 km wide, alluvial, extremely fertile, and much of it one to one and a half metres below the level of the sea at high tide. Then a belt of white sand and clay. Then the forested highlands and the Guiana Shield — some of the oldest exposed rock on the planet, two billion years and more. Then, in the south-west, the Rupununi savanna.

The coastal situation is the fact everything else depends on. The Dutch built the defences in the 17th and 18th centuries and Guyanese have maintained them since: a 280 km sea wall, an intricate system of front dams and back dams, canals, and the sluice gates that everyone here calls kokers — a Dutch word still in daily use. When a koker fails or a spring tide overtops the wall, Georgetown floods, and the great flood of January 2005 put much of the coast under water and did damage worth around 60% of GDP.

Kaieteur is the reason a lot of people come to Guyana, and it does not disappoint. The Potaro river drops 226 metres in a single unbroken fall over the edge of a sandstone plateau, and then another 25 m through a cascade below. That single drop is about five times Niagara and roughly twice Victoria Falls, and because the Potaro carries a large volume even in the dry season, Kaieteur is usually described as the most powerful waterfall in the world of its height.

What makes it extraordinary is not the numbers but the emptiness. Kaieteur National Park was created in 1929 — among the earliest protected areas anywhere in South America — and there is no fence, no railing, no viewing platform in the Niagara sense and no crowd. A day flight brings twenty or thirty people from Georgetown; you walk to three viewpoints along the rim, stand at the edge if you have the nerve, and fly home.

Equatorial, hot and humid all year, with temperatures on the coast between about 24 and 31 °C every month and very little seasonal variation in heat. What varies is rain, and Guyana has an unusual pattern: two wet seasons and two dry ones.

Guyana sits between about 1° and 8° north, on the Atlantic between Venezuela's Orinoco delta and Suriname. Georgetown is at the mouth of the Demerara on the coast; Kaieteur is about 250 km inland by air; Lethem, on the Brazilian border in the Rupununi, is 450 km south and reached by air or by a long dirt road.

Almost all the roads are on the coast. Inland there is essentially one route — the Georgetown–Linden–Lethem trail, some 500 km of which the southern half is dirt — plus rivers and a network of small airstrips. For most interior destinations the honest answer is that you fly, and if the weather is bad you do not go at all.

People have lived on the Guiana Shield for at least eleven thousand years. When Europeans arrived, the coast and rivers held Lokono (Arawak) and Kalina (Carib) peoples, the delta swamps the Warrau, and the interior the Macushi, Wapishana, Patamona, Akawaio, Arekuna and Wai Wai. All nine nations are still here, and Guyana is unusual in the Americas in that its indigenous population is growing rather than shrinking.

What brought Europeans up these rivers was El Dorado. The legend began with a real Muisca ritual in Colombia — a chief gilded with gold dust who bathed in a lake — and by the 1590s had migrated in European imaginations to a golden city called Manoa on the shores of a fictional lake, Parime, somewhere in the Guiana interior. Sir Walter Raleigh came looking for it in 1595, wrote The Discoverie of the Large, Rich and Bewtiful Empyre of Guiana, and returned in 1617 on a second, disastrous expedition for which James I had him beheaded.

The first permanent European settlements here were Dutch, not British: Essequibo from about 1616, Berbice from 1627 and Demerara from 1741 — three separate colonies run by the Dutch West India Company and its rivals, trading with Amerindians and then planting sugar.

Their lasting achievement is the coast itself. The Dutch took a strip of tidal swamp below sea level and turned it into farmland using the technology they had at home: empoldering. They built a front dam against the sea, a back dam against the interior swamp, drainage and irrigation canals down each side of every estate, and sluice gates — kokers — to let water out at low tide and keep the sea out at high. Every one of those elements is still there and still in use, and the Dutch word is still the everyday Guyanese word.

It is worth being clear about who built it. The surveying was Dutch; the digging was done by enslaved Africans, by hand, with shovel and basket. Estimates of the volume of earth moved to make the Guyanese coastal plain run to figures comparable with the great pyramids, and it is arguably the largest earthwork in the Americas. Guyanese historians make this point often and it deserves repeating.

The sugar economy of the Guianas ran on enslaved African labour on a brutal scale, and the plantations here had a reputation for mortality even by the standards of the Caribbean. The response was resistance, and Guyana's national story is built on one episode of it.

On 23 February 1763, enslaved people on Plantation Magdalenenburg in Berbice rose, and the revolt spread across the colony within weeks. Under Cuffy (Kofi), a house slave of Akan origin who took the title Governor of Berbice, the rebels held most of the colony for nearly a year, negotiated with the Dutch governor for a partition of the territory, and were defeated only after Dutch reinforcements arrived from Europe and neighbouring colonies. It was one of the largest slave revolts in the history of the Americas, and it happened eighteen years before Yorktown.

Cuffy is Guyana's national hero. The 1763 Monument in Georgetown's Square of the Revolution — a huge, deliberately unclassical bronze by the Guyanese sculptor Philip Moore, unveiled in 1976 — is the country's central public memorial. And 23 February is Republic Day, celebrated as Mashramani: Guyana chose the anniversary of a slave rebellion as its national day, which is a choice worth noticing.

With emancipation the planters lost their labour force, and they replaced it with indentured immigration. Between 1838 and 1917 roughly 239,000 people from India were shipped to British Guiana on five-year contracts, along with about 32,000 Madeiran Portuguese and around 14,000 Chinese. It is the single event that made modern Guyanese society.

Indenture was not slavery and it was not free labour either. Recruitment was often deceptive, the voyage from Calcutta took three months, the contracts bound workers to a named estate, breach of contract was a criminal rather than civil matter, and wages were set low enough that most could not save the return passage. Many stayed — offered land instead of a ticket home — and by 1917, when the system was abolished under pressure from Indian nationalists, the Indo-Guyanese were the largest population group.

The Ganges, the last indenture ship, arrived in 1917. Guyana marks Indian Arrival Day on 5 May, the anniversary of the first ship, the Whitby, in 1838.

Guyanese nationalism produced two extraordinary men who began as allies and ended as the country's permanent division. Cheddi Jagan — Indo-Guyanese, a dentist trained in the United States, a Marxist — and Forbes Burnham — Afro-Guyanese, a barrister trained in London — founded the People's Progressive Party together in 1950 and won the colony's first universal-suffrage election in 1953.

Britain suspended the constitution after 133 days, sent troops and warships, and removed the government on the grounds that it was communist. The party then split in 1955, with Burnham taking most Afro-Guyanese support into what became the PNC. Through the early 1960s Britain and the United States worked, through covert funding of trade unions and opposition parties, to keep Jagan from leading the country to independence — a campaign since documented from declassified American and British files. Racial violence in 1962–64 killed hundreds and hardened the division permanently.

Burnham took power in 1964 under a proportional system introduced for that purpose, and led the country to independence on 26 May 1966 and to a republic on 23 February 1970. He then ruled until his death in 1985 through elections that international observers judged fraudulent, nationalised bauxite and sugar under the banner of "co-operative socialism," banned imports of wheat flour, split with the West and then with the Soviets, and presided over an economic collapse and an emigration so large that the Guyanese diaspora is now comparable in size to the population at home.

Two events from the end of the Burnham years still shape how Guyana is seen from outside, and the first of them is the only thing many foreigners know about the country.

On 18 November 1978, at an agricultural settlement in the north-west forest, 918 people died — most of them Americans, a third of them children — in a mass murder-suicide by cyanide-laced drink ordered by Jim Jones, leader of the American Peoples Temple. Hours earlier his men had shot dead the visiting US congressman Leo Ryan and four others at the Port Kaituma airstrip. Until 11 September 2001 it was the largest single loss of American civilian life in a deliberate act.

Two things about it are worth stating plainly. It was an American event that happened on leased Guyanese land: the Temple was an American organisation, the victims were overwhelmingly American, and Guyanese were not members. And the site is gone — the settlement was abandoned and the forest has taken it. "Jonestown" as a shorthand for Guyana is both inaccurate and, to Guyanese, extremely tiresome; the country has had a great deal of other history in the fifty years since.

On 13 June 1980, the historian Walter Rodney was killed in Georgetown when a walkie-talkie given to him by a sergeant of the Guyana Defence Force exploded in his car. Rodney — author of How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, one of the most influential works of 20th-century historiography, and a leader of the multiracial Working People's Alliance that threatened Burnham precisely by crossing the ethnic divide — was 38. A 2016 commission of inquiry concluded that the state was responsible and that the killing was a state-organised assassination.

Venezuela claims everything west of the Essequibo river — around 159,500 km², roughly two-thirds of Guyana's territory — as Guayana Esequiba. It is the largest territorial dispute in the Americas, it is live, and it is the single most important thing to understand about Guyana's international position.

The history in brief. The boundary was fixed by an arbitral award in Paris in 1899, by a tribunal of British, American and Russian jurists, which gave almost all of the disputed area to British Guiana. Venezuela accepted and demarcated it, and lived with it for sixty years. In 1962, as British Guiana approached independence, Venezuela declared the award null and void, citing a posthumously published memorandum by one of its own American lawyers alleging that the tribunal had done a political deal. The 1966 Geneva Agreement, signed weeks before Guyanese independence, committed both sides to seek a practical settlement.

Sixty years of that produced nothing, and in 2018 Guyana took the case to the International Court of Justice, asking it to confirm the 1899 award as valid and binding. The ICJ found it had jurisdiction in 2020 and again in 2023; Venezuela initially refused to participate and later did. The case on the merits is still before the Court.

In May 2015 an ExxonMobil-led consortium announced a discovery at the Liza-1 well, 190 km off the Guyanese coast in the Stabroek Block. Over the following decade the block yielded more than thirty discoveries and a recoverable resource estimate that has risen past eleven billion barrels of oil equivalent — one of the largest and fastest-developed offshore provinces of the century.

Production began in December 2019. A succession of floating production vessels — Liza Destiny, Liza Unity, Prosperity, Errea Wittu — took output past 600,000 barrels a day, with projects approved to carry it well beyond a million by the end of the decade. For a country of 830,000 people that is, per head, one of the largest oil positions on Earth.

The economic effect has no modern parallel. Guyana recorded real GDP growth of 43% in 2020, 62% in 2022 and around 43% in 2024 — repeatedly the fastest-growing economy in the world — and GDP per head went from roughly six thousand US dollars to well over twenty thousand in five years. A Natural Resource Fund holds the revenue under legislation modelled loosely on Norway's.

Guyana's forest cover is around 18 million hectares, about 85% of the country, and its deforestation rate has been among the lowest in the world — generally well under 0.1% a year. That is not an accident of poverty alone: it is also the result of low population, secure Amerindian tenure over large areas, and a deliberate policy choice.

In 2009 Guyana signed a Low Carbon Development Strategy agreement with Norway worth US$250 million for keeping the forest standing, one of the first bilateral deals of its kind and a template for what became REDD+. In 2022 it went further and sold jurisdictional carbon credits on the voluntary market. A meaningful share of that money is constitutionally directed to Amerindian villages, which is unusual and is the part conservationists point to.

English is the official language and the language of everything written. What people actually speak is Guyanese Creole — "Creolese" — an English-lexified creole with West African, Indic, Dutch and Amerindian elements, and with a range from something a British visitor follows easily to something they do not follow at all. Guyanese switch registers constantly and are very good-humoured about a foreigner's attempts.

Religion divides differently from ethnicity and just as neatly: roughly 64% Christian (Anglican, Catholic, Pentecostal, Hindu-influenced denominations and a large evangelical presence), 25% Hindu and 7% Muslim. Guyana has the largest Hindu share of any country in the Americas and one of the largest Muslim shares in the hemisphere.

The national sport is cricket, and Guyana does not have a national team — it plays as part of the West Indies, alongside Barbados, Jamaica, Trinidad and the rest. This is the clearest single piece of evidence that Guyana is a Caribbean country attached to South America rather than a South American country that happens to speak English.

For a population of under a million, the contribution is startling. Clive Lloyd captained the West Indies side of the 1970s and early 1980s that was, by most measures, the greatest team in the history of the game, winning the first two World Cups and going fifteen years without losing a Test series. Rohan Kanhai, Lance Gibbs — the first spinner to take 300 Test wickets — Alvin Kallicharran, Roy Fredericks, Carl Hooper and Shivnarine Chanderpaul, who batted for two decades in an unorthodox crab-like stance and scored over 11,000 Test runs, are all Guyanese.

Mashramani — universally "Mash" — is Guyana's national festival, held on 23 February, Republic Day, which is also the anniversary of the 1763 Berbice rebellion. The name is said to be an Amerindian word for the celebration after a piece of cooperative work is finished, which is either exactly right or a very good story.

Guyanese food is what happens when Amerindian, African, Indian, Portuguese, Chinese and British cooking share one small coastal strip for two hundred years and then stop distinguishing between themselves. It is the most interesting cuisine in South America and almost nobody outside the Guyanese diaspora has heard of it.

Street and snack food is a genre of its own: pholourie (split-pea fritters with mango sour), egg balls (a boiled egg wrapped in cassava and fried), plantain chips, salara (a coconut roll dyed bright red), pine tart, cheese roll and bake and saltfish for breakfast. Fish is excellent — hassar, gilbaka, banga mary — and the interior serves arapaima, the world's largest scaled freshwater fish, from community-managed fisheries in the Rupununi.

The one indispensable ingredient is cassareep, and there is no substitute for it. It is the juice of grated bitter cassava, boiled down with spices until it is a thick black syrup — the boiling destroys the cyanogenic compounds that make bitter cassava poisonous raw, and what is left is a preservative and a flavour that exists nowhere else. Bottled Guyanese cassareep is sold in Caribbean and West Indian grocers and online; buy that rather than trying to improvise.

Underneath Guyanese cooking sits an Amerindian technology that most visitors never think about. Bitter cassava (Manihot esculenta) contains cyanogenic glycosides in quantities that will kill you, and the Amerindian peoples of the Guianas worked out, thousands of years ago, a complete processing chain that removes them and yields four separate products.

The root is peeled and grated on a board studded with stone or metal. The pulp goes into a matapee — a long woven tube that is hung from a beam, loaded, and then stretched by a person sitting on a lever at the bottom, squeezing the juice out. The dry pulp becomes cassava bread, baked flat on a griddle, or is toasted into farine. The poisonous juice is boiled hard, which drives off the cyanide, and reduced with spices into cassareep. The starch that settles out is tapioca.

Demerara rum is a legally protected style and one of the world's great spirits categories, and the reason connoisseurs care about it is a set of pieces of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century equipment that exist nowhere else on Earth.

Everything is now made at one distillery, Diamond, run by Demerara Distillers, which inherited the stills of the colony's closed estates. Among them: the double wooden pot still from Port Mourant, dating in design to the 1730s; the wooden Coffey still from Enmore, a continuous still with a wooden column, built in 1880; and the single wooden pot still from Versailles. These are the only operating wooden stills of their kind anywhere, they are irreplaceable, and they give Demerara rum its particular heavy, sooty, dried-fruit character.

Georgetown is a low wooden city of about 200,000 people at the mouth of the Demerara, laid out by the Dutch as a drainage scheme and built by the British in timber. It was once called the Garden City of the Caribbean; decades of neglect took most of the shine off, and the oil money is now putting some of it back, unevenly and very fast.

The wooden architecture is the reason to walk here. Nineteenth-century Georgetown was built in greenheart and pine, on brick or concrete stilts against flooding, with Demerara windows — louvred, hinged at the top, propped open, with a shelf for a block of ice to cool the air coming through. City Hall (1889), a wildly ornate Gothic Revival timber pile, has been near-derelict for years and is finally under restoration; Red House, State House and the Walter Roth Museum of Anthropology are all in the same tradition.

Guyana is one of the great wildlife destinations that almost nobody uses. Around 815 bird species, 225 mammals and a nearly intact large-predator and large-herbivore fauna, in a country the size of Britain with 830,000 people and no mass tourism at all. What it lacks is infrastructure; what it offers in exchange is that you will usually be the only people there.

In 1989 Guyana did something no country had done before: it gave 3,700 km² of untouched rainforest to the international community, offering it to the Commonwealth as a laboratory for showing that a tropical forest can be used without being destroyed. The Iwokrama International Centre has run it ever since, in partnership with the sixteen North Rupununi communities, and it is where most visitors actually meet the Guyanese forest.

The Rupununi is Guyana's south-west: an area of savanna roughly the size of Slovakia, seasonally flooded, dotted with termite mounds and ité palm islands, split by the Kanuku Mountains, and worked by cattle ranches and Macushi and Wapishana villages. It is the most extraordinary landscape in the country and one of the last places on the continent where you can watch giant anteaters in open ground.

Shell Beach is about 120 km of remote sand, shell and mangrove on the Atlantic in Region One, near the Venezuelan border, and it is one of the most important sea turtle nesting sites on the northern coast of South America. Four species come ashore here: leatherback, green, hawksbill and olive ridley.

The protection effort is a genuinely good story. Turtle meat and eggs were harvested here for generations, and from the 1980s the conservationist Audley James and later the Guyana Marine Conservation Society turned the same coastal communities into the monitoring and protection programme — former hunters became rangers. The area was formally designated the Shell Beach Protected Area in 2011, at over 120,000 hectares.

The Essequibo is the largest river between the Orinoco and the Amazon: about a thousand kilometres long, and with an estuary more than twenty kilometres across that contains islands bigger than several Caribbean countries. Leguan and Wakenaam are farmed and inhabited, and Hogg Island alone is larger than Barbados.

The river is also the practical dividing line of the country and, not coincidentally, the line Venezuela's claim runs along. It is crossed by ferry from Parika, an hour west of Georgetown, and the crossing to Supenaam and on to the Pomeroon is one of the easiest and best day trips available from the capital.

Guyana's international gateway is Cheddi Jagan International Airport (GEO) at Timehri, about 40 km south of Georgetown; domestic and charter flights use Eugene F. Correia (Ogle), much closer to the city. There are no direct flights from Prague and one or two connections are the minimum. Total journey time runs from about sixteen hours to a full day and a half.

Expect 22,000–38,000 CZK for a return from Prague, and more in December, at Mashramani and around Diwali when the diaspora flies home. Book well ahead: seat capacity into Georgetown is limited, oil-industry traffic has taken up much of it, and last-minute fares are punishing.

Overland, the only practical crossings are the ferry across the Corentyne to Suriname from Moleson Creek, and the road and bridge at Lethem to Bonfim in Brazil, which connects to Boa Vista and the BR-174. Both are used and both are slow. The Venezuelan border is not a route for visitors.

The coast has roads; the interior does not. That single fact organises every itinerary in Guyana. Driving is on the left, a British inheritance shared with almost nowhere else in South America.

A workable two-week trip: Georgetown and the coast for three days, a day flight to Kaieteur, then overland or by air into the interior for Iwokrama, the canopy walkway, Surama and the Rupununi, coming out through Lethem. Add Shell Beach in season, or the Essequibo islands and Bartica if you have less time.

Guyana used to be cheap. It is not any more — the oil boom has pushed Georgetown hotel rates and restaurant prices to levels that surprise people who last came in 2015 — and the interior was never cheap in the first place, because everything there arrives by aircraft.

Realistic figures for a Czech traveller: 2,000–3,500 CZK a day staying on the coast with guesthouses, minibuses and local food; 4,000–8,000 CZK a day once you are in the interior on lodges and light aircraft, which is where the trip's value actually is. Flights from Prague 22,000–38,000 CZK return. A two-week trip doing Guyana properly is not a budget holiday, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest.

Guyana is the least visited country in South America and one of the most rewarding, and the reason is straightforward: there is very little infrastructure, so nothing has been arranged for you. There is no gringo trail, no hostel circuit, no beach resort strip. You fly to a village airstrip, a local guide meets you, and you are the only visitors there.

The interior is what to come for. Standing on the Iwokrama canopy walkway at first light with mist below and macaws crossing beneath your feet; watching a giant anteater work through Rupununi grass while a vaquero rides past on the skyline; sitting in a boat at dusk on the Rupununi river while Victoria amazonica flowers open around you — none of this requires competing with anyone. It does require a lot of money on light aircraft, and Guyana is no longer cheap.

Georgetown is a harder sell and worth persisting with. It is a decaying and reviving wooden city with the best cathedral you will ever see made of timber, a cast-iron market that is the loudest place in the Caribbean, manatees living in the botanical gardens, and food from six culinary traditions within a hundred metres of each other. Go early to Stabroek, walk in daylight, take taxis at night, and talk to people, because Guyanese will talk to you.

Practical closing advice, in order: verify the entry rules before you book, because they change; get the yellow fever certificate; take malaria prophylaxis for the interior only; bring US dollars in cash; buy travel insurance that includes evacuation; put a spare day either side of every internal flight; and go now, while it is still like this, because the oil is going to change it.