🇬🇫 French Guiana

Where is French Guiana?

French Guiana lies in South America, on the continent of Americas.

It sits in the northern half of the world, roughly 445 km from the equator.

Its coastline is about 763 km long.

It shares a border with 2 countries: Brazil and Suriname.

How big is French Guiana?

French Guiana covers 83 534 square kilometres.

That is about 2 times the size of Switzerland.

If everybody spread out evenly, there would be about 3.5 people on every square kilometre.

Who lives in French Guiana?

About 291 thousand people live in French Guiana.

People here speak French.

They pay with the Euro (€).

On average, people born here can expect to live about 76 years.

The land of French Guiana

The land in French Guiana sits on average 168 metres above sea level, which makes it one of the flatter countries on Earth.

Its coast runs for about 763 km. Walking it end to end, at twenty kilometres a day, would take roughly 38 days.

It lies inside the tropics, which is the single biggest reason its weather is the way it is.

What makes French Guiana different?

Websites from here often end in .gf.

French Guiana and the rest of the world

Out of every thousand people alive on Earth, about 0 live in French Guiana.

It takes up about 0.06 % of all the land that countries stand on.

That is emptier than the world average of roughly 60 people per square kilometre.

French Guiana and its neighbours

Brazil, its largest neighbour, is about 101.9 times bigger.

Brazil has more people: 209.5 million against 291 thousand.

A country, or a territory?

French Guiana is not an independent country but a territory. It has its own name, its own borders and often its own laws, but another country speaks for it abroad — it holds no seat of its own at the United Nations, for instance.

That is more common than it sounds. There are dozens of such places around the world: some sit far from the country they belong to, some right beside it. A few govern themselves almost completely and hand over only defence and foreign policy; others are held more closely. How much a territory decides for itself is settled case by case, never by one rule.

On this site territories get a page of their own, because children look them up and because other pages link to them. They are left out of the record lists, though: those rank only members of the United Nations, so that a ranking never mixes countries with places belonging to somebody else.

Its nearest neighbour by land is Brazil.