French Guiana, also known by its French name Guyane or Guyane française, is an overseas department and region of France located on the northern coast of South America in the Guianas and the West Indies. Bordered by Suriname to the west and Brazil to the east and south, French Guiana covers a total area of 84,000 km2 (32,000 sq mi) and a land area of 83,534 km2 (32,253 sq mi). As of January 2026, it is home to 298,554 people.
French Guiana is the second-largest region of France, being approximately one-seventh the size of European France, and the largest outermost region within the European Union. It has a very low population density, with only 3.88 inhabitants per square kilometre (10.0/sq mi). About half of its residents live in its capital, Cayenne. Approximately 98.9% of French Guiana is covered by forests, much of it primeval rainforest. Guiana Amazonian Park, 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 single territorial collectivity, the French Guiana Territorial Collectivity. This assembly, the French Guiana Assembly, replaced the former regional council and departmental council, which were dissolved. 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. French Guiana is the only territory on the continental mainland of the Americas that is still under the sovereignty of a European state.
The border between French Guiana and Brazil is the longest land border that France shares with another country, as well as one of only two borders that France shares with non-European states, the other being the border with Suriname in the west.
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the name "Guyana" is an indigenous term meaning "land of many waters". The addition of the adjective "French" in most languages other than French is rooted in colonial times, when five such colonies (The Guianas) had been named along the coast, subject to differing powers: namely (from west to east) Spanish Guiana (now Guayana Region in Venezuela), British Guiana (now Guyana), Dutch Guiana (now Suriname), French Guiana, and Portuguese Guiana (now Amapá in Brazil). French Guiana and the two larger countries to the west, Guyana and Suriname, are still often collectively referred to as "the Guianas" and lie largely on the elevated landmass of the Guiana Shield.
Indigenous inhabitants and early French attempts at colonization
French Guiana was originally (and still is) inhabited by Indigenous people: Kalina or Galibi (speaking languages of the Cariban family), Lokono or Arawak (speaking languages of the Arawakan family), Palikur (Arawakan), Teko or Emerillon (Tupian), Wayampi (Tupian), and Wayana (Cariban). The French attempted to create a colony in the region in the 16th century in conjunction with its settlement of some Caribbean islands, such as Guadeloupe and Saint-Domingue. The first French establishment is recorded in 1503, but France did not establish a durable presence until colonists founded Cayenne in 1643.
French Guiana was developed as a slave society, where planters trafficked Africans as enslaved labourers on large sugar and other plantations. The system of slavery in French Guiana continued until the French Revolution, when the National Convention voted to abolish the French slave trade and slavery in France's overseas colonies in February 1794, months after enslaved Haitians had started a slave rebellion in the colony of Saint-Domingue. However, the 1794 decree was only implemented in Saint-Domingue, Guadeloupe and French Guiana, while the colonies of Senegal, Mauritius, Réunion, Martinique and French India resisted the imposition of these laws.
Bill Marshall, Professor of Comparative Cultural Studies at the University of Stirling, wrote of French Guiana's origins:
"The first French effort to colonize Guiana, in 1763, failed utterly when tropical diseases and climate killed all but 2,000 of the initial 12,000 settlers ... During its existence, France transported approximately 56,000 prisoners to Devil's Island. Fewer than 10 percent survived their sentence."
Île du Diable (Devil's Island) was the site of a small prison facility, part of a larger penal system by the same name, which consisted of prisons on three islands and three larger prisons on the mainland. This was operated from 1852 to 1953.
In addition, in the late nineteenth century, France began requiring forced residencies by prisoners who survived their hard labour. A Portuguese-British naval squadron took French Guiana for the Portuguese Empire in 1809. It was returned to France with the signing of the Treaty of Paris in 1814. Though Portugal returned the region to France, it kept a military presence until 1817.
After French Guiana was established as a penal colony, officials sometimes used convicts to catch butterflies. The sentences of the convicts were often long, and the prospect of employment very weak, so the convicts caught butterflies to sell in the international market, for both scientific purposes and general collecting.
Shifting sovereignty and border disputes
A border dispute with Brazil arose in the late 19th century over a vast area of jungle, resulting in the short-lived, pro-French, independent state of Counani in the disputed territory. There was some fighting among settlers. The dispute was resolved largely in favour of Brazil by the arbitration of the Swiss government.
The territory of Inini consisted of most of the interior of French Guiana when it was created in 1930. In 1936, Félix Éboué from Cayenne became the first black man to serve as governor in a French colony.
During World War II and the fall of France to German forces, French Guiana became part of Vichy France. Guiana officially rallied to Free France on 16 March 1943. It abandoned its colony status and once again became a French department on 19 March 1946 by the Law on Departmentalization.