Suriname Geography, Climate & Nature

Suriname lies on the north coast of South America between one and six degrees north, bounded by the Atlantic, Guyana across the Corantijn, French Guiana across the Marowijne, and Brazil to the south, with disputed southern wedges on both river borders. It covers 163,820 square kilometres, 156,000 of them land and 7,820 water, the smallest independent country on the continent, and falls into four zones from the coast inward: a young coastal plain of mud banks, sand beaches, mangroves and lagoons with 781 square kilometres of tidal flats; an old coastal plain; the savanna or Zanderij belt; and the interior residual uplands of the Guiana Shield, rolling hills of forest that rise to Julianatop at 1,280 metres in the Central Suriname Nature Reserve and to the Tafelberg tepui at 1,026. Over 90 per cent of the territory is rainforest, 94.6 per cent of the land by the 2018 estimate, and 16 per cent is parks and lakes.

The rivers are the geography: the Suriname, dammed at Afobaka between 1961 and 1964 to make the Brokopondo reservoir of about 1,560 square kilometres, nearly one per cent of the country and one of the largest in the world; the Coppename, with the Raleighvallen rapids and the Voltzberg inselberg; the Nickerie; the Marowijne on the eastern border, crossed by ferry from Albina; and 1,200 kilometres of navigable waterway that remain the most important means of transport inland. Roads run to 4,304 kilometres, 1,119 of them paved, almost all on the coast.

Paramaribo, about 15 kilometres inland on the Suriname River, has roughly 252,581 people by the 2025 estimate, almost half the country; Nieuw Amsterdam faces it across the confluence with the Commewijne; Nieuw Nickerie on the rice coast is the third city; Albina is the border town in the east. The Sipaliwini district, 130,567 square kilometres of tribal land with 37,065 people, is most of the interior, reached by river and by the airstrips Operation Grasshopper cut in the 1950s; the international airport is at Zanderij, 45 kilometres south of the capital.

Suriname lies between two and five degrees north of the equator and has a very hot and wet tropical climate in which temperatures barely vary through the year; average relative humidity is between 80 and 90 per cent, which makes the heat feel hotter still. Paramaribo's climate is tropical rainforest, governed by the Intertropical Convergence Zone rather than the trade winds and free of tropical cyclones: average highs of 30 degrees and lows of 24 in every month, about 2,135 millimetres of rain a year, no true dry season -- every month averages more than 60 millimetres -- but a clear rhythm, with the heaviest rain from April to July and the driest period from September through November. The interior is classed as tropical rainforest and tropical monsoon, hot and humid year-round.

The advisories give the practical calendar: the Canadian one puts the rainy seasons at May to August and November to February, with seasonal flooding that can cut roads and damage bridges; the UK one warns of flooding in the north and centre from May to August and of heatwaves. Suriname has run a carbon-negative economy since 2014 on the strength of its forest, and climate change is expected to bring hotter temperatures and changed rainfall.

Best Destinations by Month has the practical reading.

Suriname has, by its own encyclopaedia's count, the highest or second-highest proportion of forest cover in the world -- over 90 per cent of the territory, 94.6 per cent of the land -- and it runs in four bands from the sea: the young coastal plain of mud banks, sand beaches, mangrove forests and lagoons, where the black-mangrove forests are staging and wintering grounds for birds such as the scarlet ibis and where poaching takes tens of thousands of protected shorebirds a year; the old coastal plain; the savanna belt; and the interior uplands of the Guiana Shield. The Central Suriname Nature Reserve, created in 1998 from the Raleighvallen, Tafelberg and Eilerts de Haan reserves and a World Heritage Site since 2000, holds 16,000 square kilometres of montane and lowland primary forest with over 5,000 identified plants, jaguar, giant armadillo, eight species of primates and the Guianan cock-of-the-rock, which leks on the Voltzberg, a 240-metre inselberg where more than 400 bird species have been recorded and which is printed on the 20-dollar note. Brownsberg, 12,000 hectares on a 500-metre plateau above the reservoir, has an estimated 1,450 plants and 350 birds -- howler monkeys, grey-winged trumpeters, toucans, red-rumped agoutis; the Sipaliwini savanna, 100,000 hectares protected since 1972, continues Brazil's Tumucumaque; and Galibi's beaches at the Marowijne mouth draw leatherbacks from as far as Costa Rica, almost half the known population by the article's unfootnoted count.

The fresh water holds some 61 endemic fish and is seriously threatened by gold mining; the Atlantic goliath grouper is endangered offshore. In all 16 per cent of the country is parks and lakes, and the Brokopondo reservoir drowned forest over 1,560 square kilometres to make one of them.

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

The animals a visitor can expect are the howler monkeys, toucans, trumpeters and agoutis of Brownsberg, an easy day from the capital; the cock-of-the-rock and the monkeys of the Voltzberg and the rapids of Raleighvallen for those who fly or boat into the Central Suriname Nature Reserve; scarlet ibis in the coastal mangroves; and, from March, the leatherbacks hauling out at night on Galibi's beaches, an hour and a half by boat from Albina. Jaguar, giant armadillo and the eight primates of the reserve are on the inventory, not the itinerary.

The practical zoology is the advisories': rabies is common in dogs and some wildlife including bats, dengue and Zika are carried by mosquitoes, schistosomiasis is on the UK list, and the dense jungle and its fauna are hazardous enough that Canada says never to trek without an experienced guide.