Wikimedia Commons / CC-BY-SA-3.0 / GFDL
Capital: Cayenne
Population: 290,000+
Language: French (Guianese Creole, plus Amerindian, Maroon and Hmong)
1 – Devil’s Island Penal Colony (also above)
The Îles du Salut, Île Royale, Île Saint-Joseph and Devil’s Island, lie about 15 km off Kourou, and from 1852 to 1953, they were the offshore heart of the penal colony to which France sent around 70,000 convicts, many of whom never returned.
Boats from Kourou reach Île Royale, with its old hospital, chapel and guards’ buildings among the palms, and Saint-Joseph, with its solitary-confinement blocks, while Devil’s Island itself, where Captain Alfred Dreyfus was held in a stone hut from 1895 to 1899, is seen only from the water.
The islands of the Devil’s Island Penal Colony have belonged to France’s space agency, CNES, since 1971, as they lie under the flight path of rockets from Kourou, and Henri Charrière’s 1969 memoir Papillon and the 1973 film with Steve McQueen made the bagne famous worldwide.
2 – Space Centre
Europe’s spaceport, the Guiana Space Centre, covers about 700 km² of coast near Kourou, chosen by France in 1964 after Algerian independence cost it its Sahara launch site, and at about 5° north, the Earth’s spin gives eastbound rockets a boost of some 460m per second.
Guided tours of the Space Centre visit the launch complexes and the Jupiter control room, and its Space Museum is French Guiana’s most-visited attraction.
On 25 December 2021 an Ariane 5 launched the James Webb Space Telescope from the Space Centre so precisely that it saved enough fuel for well over ten years of science, and among the scientists behind Webb’s mid-infrared instrument was its co-principal investigator, Professor Tom Ray of the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies.
3 – Cacao
Cacao is a village on the Comté River, about an hour’s drive from Cayenne, settled in the late 1970s by Hmong refugees from Laos, who had fought alongside France and the United States before the communist takeover of 1975.
Cacao’s Sunday market draws visitors from across French Guiana for Hmong embroidery, noodle soups and spring rolls, and the village also has a small insect museum.
Within a generation, the Hmong of Cacao turned a clearing in the rainforest into farmland that supplies fruit and vegetables across French Guiana, including the central market in Cayenne.
4 – Saint-Laurent-du-Maroni
Saint-Laurent-du-Maroni, on the Maroni River facing Suriname, was founded in 1858 around the Camp de la Transportation, where convicts from France landed first and were sorted before being sent on to the islands or forest camps.
The Camp de la Transportation at Saint-Laurent-du-Maroni, a listed historic monument, is seen with a guide, with cells where prisoners’ feet were bolted to iron bars at night, and from the waterfront pirogues run upriver to the villages of the Maroons, descended from Africans who escaped slavery in Suriname.
Saint-Laurent-du-Maroni was itself part of the prison, created in 1880 as France’s first penal commune, and in cell 47 of the camp the name “Papillon” is carved into the floor, though no one knows who carved it.
5 – Cayenne
Cayenne, the capital, sits on a headland where the Cayenne River meets the Atlantic, where French settlers arrived in 1643 and built a fort on a hill named after the Kalina chief Cépérou, though the colony took permanent hold only in 1664 and later passed between the French, Dutch, English and Portuguese.
Cayenne’s old town of Creole shutters and iron balconies surrounds the Place des Palmistes, laid out in 1821, with the Musée des Cultures Guyanaises nearby and the ruins of Fort Cépérou above the port.
A monument on Cayenne’s Place des Palmistes honours Félix Éboué, born here in 1884, who as governor of Chad, rallied it to de Gaulle’s Free France on 26 August 1940, and in 1949 he became the first Black person laid to rest in the Panthéon.