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.

Covering 34,000 square kilometres of roadless interior forest, this park protects the massive 710-metre Mount Bellevue inselberg near Saül. Traditional motorised pirogues navigate the Maroni and Oyapock river rapids to link remote Maroon communities like Apatou. These historic riverside settlements preserve 18th-century wood-carving techniques and the syncopated three-drum rhythms of Aléké music, which evolved from ancestral West African traditions.