French Guiana 🇬🇫

French Guiana is a territory in South America, and it is not a sovereign state in its own right. Treaties and official documents call it Guiana. Its seat of government is Cayenne.

It covers 83,534 km², which ranks it 118th of the 250 countries and territories in this dataset — just behind the United Arab Emirates and just ahead of Czechia. For scale, it is almost exactly the same size as Austria.

It is home to roughly 300,000 people, placing it 184th of 250 by population — between Mayotte above it and New Caledonia below. Measured only against its own subregion, it is 13th of 14 in size and 13th in population.

French Guiana does not hold a United Nations seat of its own. It is administered as a dependency or overseas territory rather than as a sovereign state, which is why it sits outside the 193 member states while still appearing among the 250 entries on this site.

Not holding a UN seat is not the same as having no self-government, and the administrative details make that clear. French Guiana has 5 of the five markers of separate administration tracked on this page — its own currency, its own dialling code, its own internet domain, its own iso codes and a designated capital. In day-to-day terms it is run substantially as its own jurisdiction.

• Its own currencyEUR
• Its own dialling code+594
• Its own internet domain.gf
• Its own ISO codesgf / GUF
• A designated capitalCayenne

The coordinates the dataset gives are 4.0° N, 53.0° W, which puts it in the northern hemisphere, roughly 445 km from the equator, in what geographers would call the equatorial belt.

Countries on the same parallel, far away in longitude, include Cameroon, Malaysia and Equatorial Guinea.

It borders 2 neighbours: Brazil and Suriname. The largest of them by area is Brazil, which is also the most populous. Together those neighbours hold about 212.6 million people.

It has both a coastline and land borders, which is the most common arrangement of all.

Density comes out at around 3.6 people per square kilometre, which makes it very thinly populated. The median across all 250 entries here is about 90 per square kilometre.

The demonym is Guianan, so residents are Guianans.

French is the only official language. Another 45 entries list French too — among them Belgium, Benin, Burkina Faso and Burundi.

Against the Americas as a whole it is the 32nd most populous of 56 entries, and it accounts for under 1% of everyone living in South America.

French Guiana does not have the Euro to itself. It is one of 38 entries on this site that use the currency, whose code is EUR, and the others include listed below. A shared currency usually points at something real — a monetary union, a currency board, a former colonial administration, or a small economy pegging itself to a large neighbour's money — and it means a price quoted in EUR travels further than you might expect.

Language reaches wider still. French is listed for 46 entries here, French Guiana among them, so a visitor who speaks it can be understood across a large part of the map. Shared language tends to outlive the empires, trade routes and migrations that spread it, which is why the linguistic map and the political one rarely line up.

Zoom in from the world to South America and French Guiana sits 13th of 14 by population and 13th by area. Its immediate company in that ordering is Suriname just above and Falkland Islands just below, which is a more honest comparison set than a global league table.

Brazil is the largest of the group by population, and every entry in South America has its own page here if you want to work through the whole neighbourhood rather than one country at a time.

• 🇸🇷 Suriname
• 🇫🇰 Falkland Islands
• 🇧🇷 Brazil

The currency is the Euro (€, EUR). Another 37 entries use the same currency — Andorra, Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria and Croatia among them — so exchange rates move for reasons that have nothing to do with French Guiana.

Cayenne is the city to remember for this territory.

Its internet country code is .gf. Calls from overseas start with +594. In ISO terms it is gf in two letters and GUF in three.

On the UN list it does not appear as a member. Its official name points to France as the administering state. Of the 250 entries here, 57 are territories or observers rather than member states.