French Guiana
November 26th - 29th, 2025
The last part of my recent South-America trip took me to French Guiana, which is an overseas department of France, and unlike some of France's other overseas territories, it is also a full member of the EU and the Euro is the official currency here. The area was colonized by French in the 17th century. During the 19th and early 20th centuries, it was mainly known as a French penal colony, where France sent its most notorious prisoners. Today it is most famous for being the site of the Guiana Space Centre near Kourou, where the European Space Agency launches its satellites.
After a two-hour bus ride from Paramaribo we reached the wide Maroni River, which forms the border between Suriname and French Guiana. There is no bridge over the river, so we were put into these small motorboats with our luggage and ferried across to the immigration offices on the other side.
We met our new local guide and then had another two hour bus trip from the river to our hotel in Kourou. Along the way we stopped to visit the beautifully painted Église Saint-Joseph de Saint-Laurent-du-Maroni.
While the church looks like a fairly ordinary colonial church from the outside, it is stunning from the inside. The entire space is painted in vivid and colorful murals. And most remarkably, these were not created by professional artists, but painted by prisoners of the nearby penal colony in the early 20th century.
We stayed in Hotel Mercure Kourou Ariatel for three nights, while exploring the main sights in French Guiana. On our second day we headed out for a full day trip to Devil's Island. At the dock, before getting on the boat, we saw these very funny looking fish with eyes on top of their heads. These are mudskippers, which is a type of amphibious fish. They can walk on their fins and breathe through their skin, which allows them to spend long periods out of the water.
The boat trip on a large catamaran took us out into the Atlantic on a beautiful sunny day. Along the way we could see the Ariane 6 launch tower at the Space Centre in the distance.
After about one and a half hours of sailing we were approaching the group of small palm-covered islands. They are called the Salvation Islands (Îles du Salut), and are made up of three islands, of which Devil's Island is the most famous. These beautiful islands have a dark past, as the site of an infamous penal colony, which housed up to 700 prisoners at its peak.
The islands were established as an overseas penal colony in 1852, under Emperor Napoleon III. France intended to relieve their overcrowded prisons at home while simultaneously exploiting French Guiana economically by the use of forced labor. While most of the prisoners shipped from France were put in labor camps on the mainland, the islands were reserved for the most high-profile and high-risk political prisoners. The most famous prisoner here was Alfred Dreyfus (from the Dreyfus affair), who spent nearly five years in isolation on Devil's Island, before he was exonerated.
The living conditions on the islands were brutal and an estimated 70% of the prisoners brought here died within a few years, mainly from tropical diseases. The penal colony was finally closed in 1953. Tourists can visit the Île Royale, which is the largest of the three islands. Devil’s Island itself is uninhabited and closed to visitors. This is the view of Devil's Island from the Île Royale. These two islands used to be connected by a cable car to transport people and supplies across the shark invested waters.
We had a very interesting tour through the ruins and restored buildings on the Île Royale.
Following a lovely lunch in the restaurant located on the highest point on the island, we got back on the boat for the short hop to Île Saint-Joseph, the third island. There we spent some time on the beach and walking around the whole island. I also did some swimming in the very warm and beautifully clear waters. There were many sea turtles popping up near the shore.
The island has an old cemetery, which was only used for women and children. The bodies of dead prisoners were simply thrown in the ocean (which also attracted sharks and made any attempted escape by swimming a dangerous proposition).
On the way back from the islands we saw a couple of these fairly rare scarlet ibis. They were quite far away, that's why this picture is not very sharp.
The next morning we visited Europe's spaceport - the Guiana Space Centre in Kourou, which was started here in the early 1960s. French Guiana's location close to the equator, makes it an ideal site to launch rockets into orbit from. The Space Centre is very important to French Guiana’s economy, as it attracts investments, infrastructure and skilled employment for thousands of people, which is the reason that French Guiana has a much higher per-capita income than its neighbors.
Unfortunately we were not able to visit the launch pads and buildings inside the space center, since there was going to be a launch only two days after our visit, and so security was very tight. We were able to visit the attached museum, which was really interesting, as we received a guided tour from one of the scientists working there.
This is an Ariana 6 engine. Only one of them powers the main booster of the rocket. These engines, together with the rest of the booster burn up on re-entry into the atmosphere. Unlike SpaceX rockets no part of the Ariane rockets are currently reusable. So they have to build a new engine like this for every launch - one of the reasons that each Ariane 6 launch costs about 100 million Euros.
Following our visit of the Space Center, we drove to Cayenne, which is the local administrative capital of French Guiana (the actual capital is of course Paris). Cayenne is a charming little city, which has its rough and dangerous parts, but those seem to be strictly on the outskirts. The city center is set out in a grid and lined by pastel-colored colonial buildings, little parks and a lively market. It also has a very ethnically diverse population of people of Creole, Hmong, Brazilian, and Lebanese origin. Many of the shops around town seem to be owned and run by Chinese.
At the heart of the city lies the Place des Palmistes, which is a large palm-lined square, which is where most of the city gathers in the evenings and the whole square is full of food trucks and music. Unfortunately we only had a day trip, and did not see Cayenne at night.
The city is set on a peninsula between the Atlantic Ocean and the estuary of the Cayenne River. Overlooking the city from a hilltop, Fort Cépérou marks the site of the earliest French settlement in the 17th century. It offers panoramic views over city, the river and the ocean.
There is a lot of interesting graffiti art all around the city.
The Cathédrale Saint-Sauveur de Cayenne was first built of wood in the early 19th century, but the building was replaced by the current stone structure in the late 1920s.
The trip could have ended here, but Cayenne has very limited international flight connections. There are only a couple of flights a day to Paris, and one or two to other French Caribbean islands. That's the reason why we took the 4 hour ride on the bus back to Paramaribo, where we ended the trip with a lovely group dinner in the hotel. I flew back to Georgetown the next day and from there straight back to New York.
No comments:
Post a Comment