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French Guiana
The European Union's rainforest frontier in South America, and Europe's gateway to orbit
Drive east from Cayenne and the European Union ends at a bridge over the Oyapock River, with Brazil on the far bank. French Guiana is the largest piece of the EU outside Europe, an overseas department and region of France on the northeastern shoulder of South America, where the euro is the currency, French law applies, and voters elect deputies to the National Assembly in Paris. It is also the place from which Europe reaches orbit. Rockets lifting off from the Guiana Space Centre at Kourou, close to the equator, carry satellites for the European Space Agency, European governments, and commercial customers, and their countdowns are broadcast live from a coastline most Europeans have never seen.
The territory covers about 83,500 square kilometers, roughly the size of Austria, between the Maroni River, which forms the border with Suriname, and the Oyapock, which forms the border with Brazil, at about 730 kilometers the longest land border France shares with any country. Tropical rainforest covers more than 90 percent of the land, much of it protected within the Amazonian Park of French Guiana, and the low hills of the Guiana Shield rise inland to about 850 meters. Nearly all of the roughly 296,000 residents live along a narrow coastal strip around Cayenne, Kourou, and Saint-Laurent-du-Maroni. France governs through a prefect alongside an elected Territorial Collectivity. Suriname maintains a long-standing claim to a forested area in the far south, between the Litani and Marouini rivers, which France administers.
France established a lasting foothold at Cayenne in the seventeenth century, and from the 1850s until the early 1950s the colony was best known for its penal settlements, including the prison on Devil's Island. In 1946 it became an overseas department, with the same legal standing as departments in mainland France, and in 2016 its department and region merged into a single territorial collectivity. The space center, which opened in the 1960s, anchors much of the formal economy. Debates continue over the cost of living, unemployment, illegal gold mining in the interior, and public services, and a general strike in 2017 won an aid package from Paris worth more than a billion euros. Local elected officials have since pressed for a new status with greater autonomy, and talks on that question have continued into the mid-2020s.