October 15 - Cayenne Day in French Guiana

Posted on October 15, 2021

Key Points

This is an update of my post published on October 15, 2010:

Market in French Guiana

Not to be confused with French Guinea, which was an African colony of France and is now the independent nation of Guinea, or with Guyana, which was a British colony in South America and is now an independent nation, French Guiana is an overseas region of France located at the northern end of South America.

Cayenne is the “capital city” of this region, and today is its regional festival.

French Guiana is about the size of South Carolina, but people live pretty much only on the strip of land next to the ocean. The interior of the region is thick jungle that is hard to travel through.

Rowing to French Guiana…

A young woman named Katie Spotz (22 years old) planned to row a boat solo from Africa to French Guiana. She ended up having to go farther, past Cayenne in French Guiana, to Georgetown in nearby Guyana, because of bad weather and ocean swells.

Which ocean did she cross?

Spotz became the first American to row solo across an ocean as well as the youngest person to do so. Her 70+ day journey raised 75 thousand dollars for Blue Planet Run, an organization that helps communities around the world obtain clean drinking water.

Get a taste of French Guiana with these five photos:

See also 15 Real Life Ghost Ships

Most of these photos are unsurprising. A nation mostly covered
with jungle, near the equator, on the Caribbean…
yeah! It makes sense that there would be palm trees, monkeys,
lush islands, turquoise waters…

Wait – what???
This is the photo that surprised me. It would seem to
me that a jungle would NOT be a great place for a
space center. But apparently the Guiana Space Center’s
location was chosen because it is on the coast in a
sparsely populated area, and because the area is
not troubled by storms or earthquakes.

The Guinana Space Center is used by the European Space
Agency, the French Space Agency, and Arianespace,
a private enterprise like SpaceX in the U.S.