French Guiana is the strangest case on this coast. It sits on the South American mainland, but it is not a country. It is part of France, an overseas department, which makes it part of the European Union, using the euro, with its people French citizens.
It is the third of the three Guianas, the French one, east of Dutch Suriname and British Guyana. Like them it faces the Atlantic, not the Caribbean Sea, and it is Caribbean by culture and history rather than by its shore.
Most of it is rainforest on the Guiana Shield, more than ninety percent of the land. Because it is French, this is the only part of the Amazon that lies inside the European Union. That interior belongs to the continent, not the Caribbean.
Its coast carries two things the rest of the shore does not. At Kourou stands Europe's Spaceport, where the European Space Agency has launched its rockets since 1968, placed here because the equator gives a launch a free push from the spin of the Earth. Off the same coast lie the Salvation Islands, one of which is Devil's Island, the French penal colony that held prisoners until the last century.
Its people and past are Caribbean. The French built sugar plantations on the coast and worked them with enslaved Africans, and out of that came a French Creole culture like the one across the rest of the Caribbean.
So French Guiana is Caribbean in its people and its history, French in its politics, and European on the map. It faces the Atlantic, sits on the Amazon, and belongs to the same plantation coast as the rest of this shore.
