Guyana

The Dutch were the first Europeans to settle, from the seventeenth century, draining the coastal swamp behind an elaborate system of sea walls, dams, and canals — Georgetown still sits below high-tide level — and working sugar estates with enslaved Africans. Britain took the colonies during the Napoleonic Wars and united them as British Guiana in 1831.

After the abolition of slavery in 1834, the planters imported indentured labourers, overwhelmingly from India, to keep the sugar economy going. Their descendants and the descendants of enslaved Africans became the country's two largest communities, and the split between them has shaped politics ever since, with the main parties drawing support along ethnic lines.

Guyana became independent in 1966 and a republic in 1970, following a socialist, increasingly authoritarian path under Forbes Burnham into the 1980s. In 1978 the American cult leader Jim Jones directed the mass murder-suicide of more than 900 of his followers at "Jonestown" in the northwest interior. Democracy and the economy recovered slowly from the 1990s; then, from 2015, ExxonMobil discovered enormous offshore oil reserves, and production since 2019 has made Guyana one of the fastest-growing economies in the world — while Venezuela has revived a long-standing claim to the Essequibo, which makes up two-thirds of the country.

Guyana's culture is Caribbean rather than Latin American, and shaped above all by its two main groups: Indo-Guyanese, mostly Hindu with a Muslim minority, and Afro-Guyanese, mostly Christian, alongside smaller communities of Indigenous "Amerindian" peoples (nine nations, mainly in the interior), and people of mixed, Portuguese, and Chinese descent.

The result is an unusual religious calendar in which Diwali, Eid, Christmas, Easter, Phagwah (Holi), and the Indigenous Heritage Month are all national occasions. Chutney and chutney-soca music blend Indian and Caribbean sounds; "limin'," cricket, and the rum shop are shared Caribbean institutions.

Politics has long been polarised between the parties associated with the two big communities, and elections are tense; the oil wealth has raised the stakes and the debate over how it should be shared. Family, faith, and a strong pull to emigrate — the diaspora in New York, Toronto, and London is roughly as large as the home population — are constants.

Some 90 percent of Guyanese live on the narrow coastal plain, most in and around Georgetown, a city of wooden colonial buildings, canals, and a long sea wall, and in the sugar and rice belts of the Berbice and Demerara regions. The vast interior — rainforest, the Rupununi savanna, and tabletop mountains — holds only a small, mostly Indigenous population.

The economy, long dependent on sugar, rice, gold, and bauxite, is now dominated by oil, which has brought a construction and spending boom, inflation, and a strained capital. The challenge, widely discussed, is turning offshore revenue into schools, roads, and jobs rather than a new round of division and waste.

Coastal daily life runs on the minibus, the market, the mosque, temple, or church, and the rhythm of the rice and sugar seasons; in the interior it follows the rivers, the ranch, and the farming and hunting calendar.

Guyanese food is a genuine fusion. Curry, roti, and dhal from the Indian indentured tradition sit alongside African-rooted dishes and Indigenous ingredients. The national dish is pepperpot, a dark, slow-cooked meat stew flavoured with cassareep (a reduction of bitter-cassava juice) and cinnamon and clove, eaten especially at Christmas with plaited bread.

"Cook-up rice," a one-pot of rice, beans, coconut milk, and meat, is the everyday staple; metemgee (ground provisions and dumplings in coconut milk), garlic pork, "bake and saltfish," and chow mein (a Chinese legacy) are all common. Curry and "seven curry" served on a water-lily leaf is the Hindu celebration meal.

Demerara rum — Guyana gave the sugar-refining term to the world — is the national spirit, and El Dorado is a globally awarded brand. Mauby, sorrel, ginger beer, and fresh fruit juices are the non-alcoholic favourites.

Kaieteur Falls is the headline: a single sheer drop of about 226 metres — several times the height of Niagara — on the Potaro River, deep in rainforest, with only a short trail and a handful of visitors on any day flying in from Georgetown, plus golden rocket frogs in the giant bromeliads and swifts nesting behind the water.

The interior rewards those with time. The Iwokrama rainforest reserve has a canopy walkway and one of the best chances anywhere of seeing a wild jaguar; the Rupununi savanna to the south has working cattle ranches turned eco-lodges (Karanambu, Dadanawa), giant river otters and giant anteaters, arapaima in the ox-bow lakes, and the Kanuku Mountains. Shell Beach on the northwest coast is a nesting site for four species of sea turtle.

Georgetown itself is worth a day for St George's Cathedral, one of the tallest wooden buildings in the world, the ornate Stabroek Market and its clock tower, the Walter Roth Museum of Anthropology, the botanical gardens with their manatees, and the long Atlantic sea wall where the city gathers in the evening.