Guyana Geography, Climate & Nature

Guyana lies on the north-east coast of South America between one and nine degrees north, bounded by the Atlantic along 459 kilometres of muddy coast, by Suriname across the Corentyne, by Brazil to the south and south-west and by Venezuela to the west, which claims the 159,500 square kilometres west of the Essequibo, about two-thirds of the country. The land is about 215,000 square kilometres in three zones. The coastal plain, five per cent of the area and home to more than 90 per cent of the people, is five or six kilometres of alluvial mud carried from the Amazon, lying below high tide and kept dry by seawalls, dams and Dutch-built canals with kokers; there is no defined shoreline or sandy beach, only marsh, mangrove, mud flats reaching 25 kilometres out off New Amsterdam, and Shell Beach in the north-west where the leatherbacks nest. Behind it the white-sand belt, 150 to 250 kilometres wide, is low sandy hills and rock outcrops under forest; behind that the highlands of the Guiana Shield, with the Pakaraima range and Mount Roraima at 2,762 metres on the Venezuelan and Brazilian tripoint, the Kaieteur plateau at about 600 metres, the Kanuku Mountains to 1,067 and the low Acarai on the Brazilian border, and between them the Rupununi savanna.

The rivers are the roads: the Essequibo, longest of the four, entering the sea 21 kilometres from Georgetown through a 20-kilometre estuary studded with islands; the Demerara, Berbice and Corentyne; and on the Essequibo's tributaries the falls -- Kaieteur on the Potaro, 226 metres in a single drop and 251 with its cascades, with an average flow of 663 cubic metres a second, and Orinduik on the Ireng. Guyana has the second-highest proportion of forest cover in the world, some of it almost inaccessible.

Georgetown, the capital, had 125,683 people in 2022 on the east bank of the Demerara mouth; Linden, New Amsterdam, Bartica at the meeting of the Cuyuni, Mazaruni and Essequibo, Corriverton at the Suriname ferry 313 kilometres east, and Lethem on the Brazilian border are the other towns. The international airport is at Timehri, 41 kilometres south of the capital; about 90 airstrips serve the interior.

Guyana's climate is tropical, hot and humid, moderated along the coast by the north-east trade winds; temperatures are consistent through the year and never dangerously high, but heat and humidity together can be oppressive, and Georgetown, under a year-round trade-wind rainforest climate, rarely sees more than 31 degrees. There are two rainy seasons -- the main article puts them at May to mid-August and mid-November to mid-January, the geography article at late April to mid-August and December to early February -- and the capital has no true dry season, every month wetter than a dry one, with humidity lowest and the drier period from September to November. Rain is heaviest in the north-west and lightest in the south-east and interior: about 2,500 millimetres a year on the coast near Venezuela, 2,000 at New Amsterdam, 1,500 in the Rupununi savanna and as much as 3,500 on the north-east mountain slopes that catch the trades.

The hazard is water rather than wind: the coast is below sea level behind a sea-defence and dam system whose drainage, both advisories say, is poorly maintained, and flooding hampers travel year round, worst in May to July and November to January by the Canadian calendar. In the Rupununi the rains flood the savanna until it shares its waters with the Amazon.

Best Destinations by Month has the practical reading.

Guyana sits on the Guiana Shield and has one of the highest levels of biodiversity in the world: more than 225 species of mammals, 900 birds, 880 reptiles and 6,500 plants across coastal, marine, mangrove, riverine, swamp, savanna, white-sand and brown-sand forest and montane habitats, under the second-highest proportion of forest cover of any country. Its famous animals are the superlatives -- the arapaima, the largest scaled freshwater fish; the giant anteater; the giant otter, the largest and rarest river otter; the harpy eagle of the Rupununi; the Guianan cock-of-the-rock -- and its emblems are the hoatzin, the Canje pheasant, the last of its taxonomic family and the national bird on the coat of arms, and the giant Amazon water lily, native to Guyana and the Amazon basin, beside it. Kaieteur's golden rocket frog lives its entire life in one bromeliad on the plateau and nowhere else on earth.

The protected estate is large and unusual: Kaieteur National Park, the country's only true national park, expanded in 1999 from 5 to 242 square miles; the Iwokrama forest, 3,716 square kilometres run by an international centre for research and sustainable use, with more than 500 bird species by its own count; the Kanuku Mountains, 6,110 square kilometres since 2011; the Kanashen area of the Wai Wai, the world's largest community-owned conservation area; and Shell Beach, the leatherbacks' major nesting ground. Karanambu in the Rupununi has protected giant otters since 1927; a survey of the North Rupununi counted 292 bird species in 58 families. Since 2009 Norway has paid Guyana to keep its forest, though the rate of loss more than doubled between the 1990s and the 2000s, and illegal mining reaches even Kaieteur.

No fuller species inventory was consulted beyond the sources named in the data file.

The animals a visitor can plan on are the Rupununi's: giant otters at Karanambu, black caiman at Caiman House by night, giant anteaters on the savanna, harpy eagle nests where the guides know them, arapaima in the ponds, and at Iwokrama the canopy walkway's birds at dawn and jaguar spotting by road at night, which the lodge sells as a tour and does not promise. The cock-of-the-rock leks near Kaieteur, the hoatzin sits in the coastal creeks, and Shell Beach's leatherbacks haul out in season. Georgetown's Botanical Gardens keep manatees in a pond.

The practical zoology is the advisories': malaria in the interior, dengue, Zika and oropouche, rabies common in dogs and bats, and rivers to be travelled only in registered boats with life jackets and never after dark.