Tailor-made French Guiana Tours 2026, 2027 & 2028

Cayenne features a coastal grid lined with weathered greenheart-timber houses constructed between 1820 and 1880. The central Place des Palmistes is framed by three-story colonial facades and the Prefecture Building—originally a Jesuit monastery built in 1729. Nearby, the Musée Départemental Alexandre-Franconie preserves 18th-century penal maps and pre-Columbian Wayana pottery, standing down the street from the yellow-brick Cathedrale Saint-Sauveur.

Located 14 kilometres off Kourou, this three-island penal archipelago processed over 70,000 French convicts. The stone ruins on Île Royale include the panoptic warden’s quarters and a prison hospital, while Île Saint-Joseph retains the roofless, deep-stone solitary confinement cells overgrown with banyan roots. On the wave-battered cliffs of Île du Diable (Devil’s Island), the stone hut of political prisoner Alfred Dreyfus remains isolated by dangerous equatorial currents.