Marco Farouk Basir / CC-BY-SA-3.0 / GFDL
Capital: Georgetown
Population: 870,000+
Language: English (Guyanese Creole, plus Amerindian languages)
1 – Shell Beach (also above)
Shell Beach runs for about 120 km along the Atlantic coast of the Barima-Waini region in Guyana’s far north-west, near the Venezuelan border, backed by the country’s largest, most intact mangrove forests, and has been a protected area since 2011.
From roughly February to August, four species of sea turtle, the leatherback, green, hawksbill and olive ridley, come ashore at night to nest at Shell Beach, while its mudflats and swamp forest hold more than 200 species of coastal and migratory birds.
Most turtle beaches host one or two species, but Shell Beach gets four, and the local Amerindian communities, who once hunted turtles for meat and eggs, have become their protectors.
2 – Kaieteur Falls
Kaieteur Falls, deep in the rainforest of central Guyana, is where the Potaro River plunges 226 m in a single drop, about four to five times the height of Niagara, at the head of a gorge in Kaieteur National Park, Guyana’s oldest, created in 1929.
There are no roads to Kaieteur Falls, so most visitors arrive by light aircraft at the plateau airstrip and walk through the forest to viewpoints over the drop, first seen by an outsider, the geologist Charles Barrington Brown, on 29 April 1870.
The name Kaieteur comes from a Patamona story of a chief called Kai, who paddled over the falls to save his people, while in the giant tank bromeliads on the plateau lives the tiny golden rocket frog, which breeds only inside their leaves.
3 – Mount Roraima
Mount Roraima, at 2,810m, is the highest of the Pakaraima chain of tepuis, stands where Guyana, Venezuela and Brazil meet, its sheer cliffs of 400 m or more forming Guyana’s highest ground, and its rivers flow towards the Amazon, the Orinoco and Guyana.
The usual route up Mount Roraima is a multi-day trek from the Venezuelan side, up a natural slope on its south-western cliffs, to a summit that is not a flat table but a black-rock maze of gorges, pools, quartz and carnivorous pitcher plants.
The first recorded ascent of Mount Roraima, by Everard im Thurn and Harry Perkins on 18 December 1884, is thought to have inspired Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World (1912), the dinosaur-plateau novel behind countless lost-world stories.
4 – Iwokrama Rainforest
The Iwokrama Rainforest covers about 371,000 ha of lowland forest in the heart of Guyana, crossed by the Essequibo River and the road from Georgetown to Lethem, its Makushi name meaning “place of refuge”.
The highlight of the Iwokrama Rainforest is its canopy walkway, a chain of bridges and platforms about 33 m above the forest floor, best at dawn for birds, with river trips and a climb up Turtle Mountain for the view, and jaguars are sometimes seen on the forest road.
The Iwokrama Rainforest exists because at the 1989 Commonwealth summit in Malaysia, Guyana’s president, Desmond Hoyte, offered a vast tract of it to the world as a research site, to test whether a rainforest can pay its way while left standing.
5 – Georgetown Parliament
The Georgetown Parliament meets in the Public Buildings on Brickdam, designed by Joseph Hadfield and completed in 1834, a cream-coloured building crowned by a central dome, in a low-lying capital built largely of timber.
Around Georgetown’s Parliament lies the colonial city, including St George’s Cathedral, about 43 m high and consecrated in 1894, among the tallest wooden churches in the world.
Among the governors who ruled from Georgetown was the Cork-born Sir Francis Hincks, a former premier of the Province of Canada, who governed British Guiana from 1862 to 1869.
6 – Victoria Village
Victoria Village, on the East Coast Demerara, about 25–30 km from Georgetown, was born on 7 November 1839, when 83 formerly enslaved people from five estates pooled their savings to buy the abandoned Northbrook plantation for 30,000 guilders, renaming it Victoria.
The money for Victoria Village was reportedly carried to the seller in a wheelbarrow, two-thirds of it paid at once in coins, some muddy from being buried, and the rest within three weeks.
Victoria Village is often called Guyana’s first village bought by freed Africans, the start of a movement in which, within a decade, about half the population had moved into free villages, and its anniversary is marked each 7 November.
7 – Fort Island
Fort Island lies in the Essequibo River about 16 km from its mouth, and by the 1740s it had become the seat of government of Dutch Essequibo, replacing the old fort at Kyk-Over-Al upriver.
Fort Island’s two survivors are Fort Zeelandia, built in 1740–43 from bricks baked on site, and the Court of Policy of about 1752, the oldest non-military building in Guyana, home to the Dutch Heritage Museum since 2007.
The Dutch who governed from Fort Island left a lasting mark on Guyana, for they drained and diked the coast into polders below sea level, the origin of the sea defences and canals that protect Georgetown.
Also of note: Jonestown. It’s the single most internationally known event associated with Guyana, but the site is now abandoned jungle near Port Kaituma.