Europe's spaceport sits in a South American rainforest department
French Guiana is an overseas department of France on South America's Guiana coast, bordering Suriname and Brazil. Second-largest French region and the European Union's biggest outermost region, it hosts the Guiana Space Centre—Europe's main launch pad—while packing only about 3.88 people per square kilometre.
French Guiana covers about 84,000 square kilometres, roughly a seventh the size of European France, and in January 2026 had 298,554 residents, about half of them in Cayenne. Forest blankets some 98.9 percent of the land, and 41 percent lies within the Guiana Amazonian Park, the EU's biggest national park. Most people live on a coastal strip; inland, near-impenetrable rainforest climbs gently to the Tumuc-Humac mountains on the Brazilian frontier, where Bellevue de l'Inini tops out at 851 metres. That border with Brazil is the longest land frontier France has with any country.
Kalina, Lokono, Palikur, Teko, Wayampi and Wayana peoples lived here before the French arrived, and still do. A lasting colony began only with the founding of Cayenne in the 17th century, and planters built a slave society on sugar. An attempt to settle 12,000 colonists in 1763 collapsed when disease and climate left only 2,000 alive. From 1852 to 1953 the Devil's Island penal system, with prisons on three islands and on the mainland, received about 56,000 convicts, fewer than one in ten of whom survived; some caught butterflies to sell to collectors abroad.
A Portuguese-British squadron seized the colony in 1809, handing it back after the 1814 Treaty of Paris. In 1936 Cayenne-born Félix Éboué became the first black governor of a French colony. After siding with Vichy, Guiana joined Free France in March 1943 and became a department in March 1946. Hmong refugees from Laos arrived in the 1970s and 1980s, and more than 10,000 Surinamese, mostly Maroons, fled civil war in the late 1980s.
In 1964 Charles de Gaulle chose the territory for a launch base to replace one in the Algerian Sahara, prizing its closeness to the equator and open ocean. The Guiana Space Centre near Kourou is now the European Space Agency's main launch site, and an Ariane 6 flew from there in 2025. French Guianese Creole is the most widely spoken language after official French. In a 2010 referendum nearly 70 percent rejected becoming an autonomous collectivity, and in March 2017 strikes culminated in the largest demonstration the territory had ever seen.
Source: French Guiana
