Cayenne

Cayenne is the capital of a place that technically isn't a country. French Guiana is an overseas region of France, with the same legal status as a French department on the mainland, which makes it part of the European Union sitting on the northeast coast of South America. Visitors pay in euros, EU citizens need no visa to enter, and the territory sends its own representatives to the French National Assembly in Paris.

That status has a very specific practical consequence about an hour from Cayenne, at the Guiana Space Centre in Kourou. The site sits close enough to the equator that a rocket launched from there gets extra speed from the Earth's own rotation, cutting fuel needs for reaching orbit. The European Space Agency and the French space agency have launched from Kourou since the 1960s, and Arianespace still runs regular missions from the same site today, with public viewing areas open for scheduled launches.

Just offshore from Kourou, the Îles du Salut hold a darker piece of the region's history. France used Île du Diable, Devil's Island, and the surrounding islands as a penal colony from the 1850s until 1953, sending prisoners to conditions that killed a large share of them through disease and forced labor. Alfred Dreyfus, the French army officer wrongly convicted of treason in a case that divided France for years, was held on Devil's Island, and the islands later became the setting for the memoir and film "Papillon." Boat tours now visit the ruins.

Cayenne's own historic center, centered on Place des Palmistes, reflects a more everyday version of French Guiana's mixed identity, where Creole, Hmong, Brazilian, and metropolitan French communities all show up in the markets and restaurants. The Hmong presence in particular traces back to refugees resettled here from Laos in the 1970s, who established farming communities that now supply much of the territory's produce.

Rainforest covers roughly 95 percent of French Guiana's land, and most visitors treat Cayenne as a base for exploring that interior alongside the coastal sites, whether through river trips, guided forest hikes, or simply the drive out toward Kourou, which cuts through dense green cover for most of the way.