French Guiana Discovery Guide

French Guiana is the Amazon with French roads, French hospitals and the euro. It is a department the size of Austria where 98.9 per cent of the land is forest, and the largest national park in the European Union covers 41 per cent of it. Fewer than 300,000 people live along one coast road. The two things the world knows it for stand fourteen kilometres apart at Kourou. One is the spaceport that has flown Ariane since 1970 and launched the James Webb telescope. The other is the prison islands where Dreyfus was held and Papillon escaped, which the rockets still empty on launch days. Beyond them are leatherback turtles hauling out at Awala-Yalimapo, caimans in the Kaw marshes, Maroon and Amerindian villages up the Maroni by pirogue, and a Carnival the encyclopaedia calls the longest in the world.

The main travel issue

It is the rain, the mosquitoes and the price of everything imported from France; the reward is a wilderness you can reach with an EU driving licence.

The solution

Come in the dry months, take the yellow-fever shot early, and give the interior more than a day.

If you travel slowly

Base in Cayenne for the market, the Place des Palmistes, Fort Cépérou's hill and the Rorota trail above the Rémire-Montjoly beaches, then move up the N1 by TIG bus or hire car: Kourou for the space centre and a day on the Salvation Islands, and Saint-Laurent-du-Maroni, three hours on, for the Camp de la Transportation and a pirogue up the Maroni to the Maroon villages. Mana and Awala-Yalimapo, an hour further, for the turtles in season.

If you want to see the essentials

The Guiana Space Centre; the Salvation Islands -- Île Royale's prison buildings, Saint-Joseph's solitary cells, Devil's Island across the strait; the Camp de la Transportation at Saint-Laurent; the Kaw marshes at dusk for caimans; Plage des Hattes for leatherbacks from March to July; and Cayenne's Carnival on any Sunday afternoon between Epiphany and Ash Wednesday.

If you seek local character

Awara broth at Easter and colombo at a wedding, atipa in coconut milk and couac on the side; the Touloulous of the Carnival; the Hmong market at Cacao on the road south of the capital; the Aluku games in early July, the Sanpula night at the end of that month and the Kali'na games in early December, which the tourism committee lists as the Amerindian and Maroon festivals to catch.

If you want to go beyond the obvious

The Guiana Amazonian Park, reached only by air or river: Saül, Maripasoula and Camopi on the daily 17-seat flights, then guided forest days; the Oyapock bridge at Saint-Georges, the first land crossing between the territory and the rest of the world, opened in 2017; and the Trésor reserve on the Kaw mountain for the orange cock-of-the-rock.

French Guiana is the department where France meets the Amazon and neither yields. The state is entirely French -- the prefecture, the gendarmerie posts at Régina and Iracoubo, the euro, health care the UK advisory calls equivalent to the mainland -- and the people are anything but a single nation: Creoles, 60 to 70 per cent of the population if the large Haitian community is counted; some 18 per cent of European ancestry; six Amerindian peoples on the coast and rivers; four Maroon peoples whose ancestors escaped Surinamese plantations and whose numbers grew by ten thousand refugees in the 1980s; Hmong farmers settled at Cacao and Javouhey in 1977; Brazilians, Chinese, Surinamese. French is the official language and Guianese Creole the one that ties them together.

The history explains the temper: a colony that failed repeatedly -- 1503, 1604, 1624, 1643 -- before it held, that killed six thousand settlers in the Kourou expedition of 1763 and was nicknamed Green Hell, that from 1852 to 1953 was France's penal dump for more than 80,000 convicts, and that since 1968 has been Europe's launch pad and, since 2007, its largest national park. The 2010 referendum rejected autonomy; the strikes of March 2017 brought the largest demonstration the territory has seen, for resources rather than independence.

Catholic, carnival-mad, French-schooled and Amazonian in its kitchen -- manioc, smoked fish, awara -- it is the least Caribbean of the Guianas and the most European.

French Guiana's forest is the asset and the state protects it on paper better than anywhere on the continent: the Guiana Amazonian Park, created by decree on 28 February 2007, puts 20,300 square kilometres under maximal protection where gold mining is forbidden and another 13,600 in a buffer, on the lands of the Aluku, Wayana, Wayampi and Teko, and with Brazil's Tumucumaque forms the largest rainforest protected area in the world. Against it stands illegal and ecologically destructive gold mining by Brazilian garimpeiros, which the encyclopaedia calls a chronic issue of the remote interior, and the mercury it leaves in the rivers. The Amana reserve of 14,800 hectares, established in 1998, protects one of the world's largest leatherback nesting beaches; the turtles need darkness and distance, so night visits are with a guide and without torches on the sand.

The rules of the ground are the advisories': the rivers are, with the aircraft, the only way into the interior, so use the pirogue operators the tourism committee lists; carry a phone and expect no coverage in the forest; take the malaria advice for the zones that need it. Repellent, not spray, in the wetlands.

Spend where it counts: Amerindian and Maroon guides on the Maroni and in the park communes, the Hmong market at Cacao, the carbets in the forest, and the ferry-and-bus route rather than a flight for the coast.

January–February -- Carnival every Sunday from Epiphany, the small rainy season alternating sun and showers, and turtles beginning to arrive on the western beaches.

March–April -- the petit été de mars, a short sunny spell the tourism committee recommends for forest and river trips; Carnival's fat days and the burial of Vaval on Ash Wednesday; leatherback nesting under way; awara broth at Easter.

May–June -- the main rains, the heaviest of the year, roads to the interior communes needing four-wheel drive; the Canadian advisory's flooding season; the last of the turtle nesting in July.

July–August -- the dry season opens in July; the Aluku games early in the month and the Sanpula night at its end; hatchlings on the beaches two months after the eggs.

September–October -- the sunniest months, highs above 30 degrees on the eastern coast, the best walking and the Kaw marshes at their most accessible.

November–December -- the dry season ends in November and the rains return in mid-December; the Kali'na games in early December; launch dates at Kourou fall in any month and close the islands.

What a day costs, by how you travel

Year-round relative cost index vs country average

Higher — Kourou around launch dates, Cayenne during Carnival, and anything flown into the interior

Average — the coast road towns, Saint-Laurent-du-Maroni

Lower — the western beaches out of turtle season, and the main rains of May and June

No fare or admission price is stated because the operators' pages did not answer a script and the tourism committee prints none; the transport facts are the committee's and the advisories' own, and the relative bands are editorial judgment.