Welcome to French Guiana!
French Guiana (French: Guyane or Guyane française) is an overseas French department and region in the Amazonia region of South America, bordering the North Atlantic Ocean, between Brazil and Suriname. It is governed as an overseas department of France with the same rights and privileges granted to all other French departments and benefits financially from the arrangement.
French Guiana (French: Guyane) is an overseas department/region and single territorial collectivity of France on the northern Atlantic coast of South America in the Guianas. It borders Brazil to the east and south and Suriname to the west.
With a land area of 83,534 km2 (32,253 sq mi), French Guiana is the second-largest region of France (more than one-seventh the size of Metropolitan France) and the largest outermost region within the European Union. It has very low population density, with only 3.5 inhabitants per square kilometre (9.1/sq mi). (Its population is less than 1⁄200 that of Metropolitan France.) Half of its 294,071 inhabitants in 2021 lived in the metropolitan area of Cayenne, its capital. 98.9% of the land territory of French Guiana is covered by forests, a large part of which is primeval rainforest. The Guiana Amazonian Park, which is the largest national park in the European Union, covers 41% of French Guiana's territory.
Since December 2015, both the region and department have been ruled by a single assembly within the framework of a new territorial collectivity, the French Guiana Territorial Collectivity (French: collectivité territoriale de Guyane). This assembly, the French Guiana Assembly (French: assemblée de Guyane), replaced the former regional council and departmental council, which were disbanded. The French Guiana Assembly is in charge of regional and departmental government. Its president is Gabriel Serville.
Fully integrated in the French Republic since 1946, French Guiana is a part of the European Union, and its official currency is the euro. A large part of French Guiana's economy depends on jobs and businesses associated with the presence of the Guiana Space Centre, now the European Space Agency's primary launch site near the equator. As elsewhere in France, the official language is standard French, but each ethnic community has its own language, of which French Guianese Creole, a French-based creole language, is the most widely spoken.