Didwin972
Did you know that there’s a little bit of France in South America? Most people don’t – except perhaps the occasional aerospace geeks following rocket launches by the European Space Agency. They take place is Guyane, a tropical-forested territory in the Amazon, on the north coast just east of Suriname and bordered on the west and south by Brazil. With around 300,000 inhabitants in an area around the size of South Carolina and slightly larger than England and Wales combined, French Guiana is arguably the least known and most under-the-radar destination in the Americas – more so even than neighboring Guyana and Suriname; last year it got just 167,000 visitors from abroad (and that was a significant increase from 2024).
Indigenous peoples lived here for millennia before the French established a durable colony in the mid-17th century. The colony did become notorious in the 19th and early 20th centuries as the site of brutal penal colonies, most notably the Îles du Salut (Salvation Islands), including Devil’s Island, which housed political prisoners such as Alfred Dreyfus (the 19th-century Jewish army officer whose wrongful - and eventually overturned - conviction caused a huge scandal in France); it was also the setting of the 1969 prison memoir and 1973 movie Papillon, with Steve McQueen and Dustin Hoffman). The prison system closed in 1953, and in 1946 French Guiana was officially integrated into France as an overseas départment, a status it retains today.
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