60 Fun Facts About Guyana

What is the capital and largest city of Guyana?

Georgetown sits at the mouth of the Demerara River, much of it below high-tide level behind a long seawall, and is laid out on a Dutch-style grid of canals.

Guyana is the only country in mainland South America with which official language?

English, inherited from British rule, is the sole official language, making Guyana unique on the South American mainland; most people speak Guyanese Creole day to day.

The name "Guyana" comes from an Indigenous Amerindian word meaning what?

'Land of many waters' is the usual rendering of the Amerindian word behind the name; Guiana once meant the whole coast from the Orinoco to the Amazon, which is why the neighbours were long called Dutch and French Guiana.

What is Guyana's currency?

The Guyanese dollar goes back to 1839, when the colony began keeping accounts in dollars because Spanish silver dollars already circulated there beside Dutch guilders; the Bank of Guyana, set up in 1965, issues it today.

The British Guiana 1c magenta, sold for a record $9.5 million in 2014, is a one-of-a-kind what?

A postage stamp printed locally in 1856 as an emergency issue, the 1c magenta survives in a single copy, which a 12-year-old schoolboy found in 1873 and sold for a few shillings.

Who remained Guyana's head of state until the 1970 republic?

Elizabeth II stayed on as Queen of Guyana, with a governor-general acting for her; independence had ended British rule but not the monarchy, which lasted until 1970.

Since 1970 Guyana's official name has called it what kind of republic?

Co-operative Republic of Guyana became the official name in 1970, when a government that had veered sharply to the left set out to organise the country's economy into co-operatives.

The annual Mashramani festival, held on 23 February, celebrates what event?

Mashramani marks Guyana becoming a republic, with costume bands and floats through the capital; the name is said to come from an Amerindian word for a celebration after hard work.

Which American religious group's members died at Jonestown, Guyana, in 1978?

The Peoples Temple, led by Jim Jones, lost more than 900 members in a single day, most to a cyanide-laced fruit drink; the phrase 'drinking the Kool-Aid' comes from the event.

Which US congressman was murdered at the Port Kaituma airstrip on the day of the Jonestown deaths?

Leo Ryan, a California Democrat, had flown in to investigate the commune; its gunmen shot him and four others dead at the airstrip on 18 November 1978, hours before the poisonings.

Which former US president oversaw Guyana's 1992 elections, the first recognised as free and fair since 1964?

Jimmy Carter's Carter Center led the international observers for the October 1992 vote, which ended 28 years of People's National Congress rule and was the first accepted as free and fair since 1964.

Which Guyanese dentist became chief minister in 1953, only for Britain to suspend the constitution within months?

Cheddi Jagan, a US-trained dentist, was removed when Britain sent in troops in October 1953; he came back as president in 1992, and his American-born wife Janet later held the office too.

Who served as Guyana's first executive president, from 1980 until his death in 1985?

Forbes Burnham led Guyana from December 1964, as premier and then prime minister, before the 1980 constitution made him executive president; he nationalised the bauxite and sugar industries.

Which Guyanese historian, author of How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, was killed in 1980?

Walter Rodney, a leading voice of the opposition Working People's Alliance, earned his SOAS doctorate at 24 and was killed at 38 on 13 June 1980 when a bomb exploded in his car.

Who became Guyana's president after the disputed 2020 election?

Irfaan Ali of the People's Progressive Party/Civic was sworn in on 2 August 2020, five months after the March vote, once a recount confirmed his party's win over David Granger's coalition.

Which country claims the territory west of Guyana's longest river, about two-thirds of the country?

Venezuela claims everything west of the river, about two-thirds of Guyana, although an 1899 tribunal in Paris awarded the land to the British colony; it revived the claim in 1962.

Which is the longest river in Guyana, at about 1,010 km?

The Essequibo rises in the Acarai Mountains on the far southern border, yet small ocean vessels can sail only about 80 km up it, to Bartica, before rapids take over; islands such as Leguan and Wakenaam fill its wide mouth.

Which river forms Guyana's border with Suriname?

The Courentyne marks the frontier, but the line runs along its west bank, so the whole river belongs to Suriname; the two countries also dispute the New River Triangle near its headwaters.

Kaieteur Falls plunges over which river?

The Potaro River plunges off a sandstone plateau at Kaieteur on its way to the country's longest river; the falls are so remote that most visitors fly in by small plane.

Kaieteur Falls' 226 m drop is about four times the height of which waterfall?

Niagara Falls is about 57 m high, so Kaieteur's single plunge is roughly four times as tall and about twice the height of Victoria Falls; it is sheer because the river runs straight off the edge of a sandstone plateau.

Which town on the Demerara River is the centre of Guyana's bauxite industry?

Linden unites the old settlements of Mackenzie, Wismar and Christianburg, which grew around a mining camp; ore is processed there and loaded onto ocean-going ships that come up the river.

Which animal of Guyana's rivers and savannah wetlands is the world's largest living rodent?

The capybara, which can top 60 kg, is semiaquatic: it takes to the water to escape predators, and it lives in every South American country except Chile.

Which table-top mountain of the Pakaraima range is Guyana's highest point?

Mount Roraima reaches 2,772 m on Guyana's side of a plateau shared with two neighbours; its sheer cliffs kept climbers off the flat top until Everard im Thurn's expedition found a way up in 1884.

Guyana's sheer, flat-topped tepuis are said to have inspired which 1912 adventure novel?

The Lost World, by Arthur Conan Doyle, puts living dinosaurs on a cliff-walled plateau; he built it from explorers' accounts, among them reports of these table mountains and Percy Fawcett's tales of a Bolivian plateau.

Which Black Panther star was born in Guyana and moved to London as a child?

Letitia Wright plays Shuri, the king's younger sister; after lead actor Chadwick Boseman died in 2020, the part was not recast and her Shuri took up the Black Panther mantle in Wakanda Forever.

Which bird, nicknamed the stinkbird and known locally as the Canje pheasant, is Guyana's national bird?

The hoatzin ferments leaves in an enlarged crop, which gives it its smell; its chicks drop into the water to escape danger, then climb back to the nest using claws on their wings.

Guyana's national flower, a giant water lily named in 1837, honours which monarch?

Queen Victoria had just come to the throne when the lily, found in British Guiana by the explorer Robert Schomburgk, was named Victoria regia in her honour; it is now called Victoria amazonica.

Which animals serve as the supporters on Guyana's coat of arms?

Two jaguars flank the shield, one holding a pickaxe for mining and the other sugar cane and a rice stalk for the sugar and rice industries.

What is Guyana's motto?

'One People, One Nation, One Destiny' appears on the scroll beneath the shield; the crest above is an Amerindian head-dress, the Cacique's Crown, flanked by two diamonds for the mining industry.

By what name is Guyana's national flag known?

The Golden Arrowhead, hoisted at independence, takes its name from the gold arrow pointing across a green field; red stands for zeal, green for farmland and forests, black for endurance and white for the rivers.

Guyana's flag was designed by Whitney Smith, an American who coined which word?

Vexillology, the study of flags, was Whitney Smith's own coinage; his design for Guyana was adopted with its red and green swapped and black and white borders added.

Which is Guyana's largest ethnic group, about two-fifths of the population in the 2012 census?

Indo-Guyanese, descended from indentured labourers from India, were 39.8% in the 2012 census, ahead of Afro-Guyanese at 29.3%; the two main political parties draw largely on those two communities.

Which religion was followed by about a quarter of Guyanese in the 2012 census?

Hinduism arrived with indentured labourers from India; about a third of Guyanese followed it at the start of the 1990s, but its share had fallen to 24.8% by the 2012 census, when Muslims were about 7%.

With nine in ten of its people living on a narrow coastal strip, what covers more than three-quarters of Guyana?

Forest covers more than four-fifths of Guyana, among the highest shares of any country; with so few people living in the interior, most of it remains intact.

Which company discovered major oil reserves off Guyana's coast in 2015?

ExxonMobil's Liza-1 well, drilled in May 2015 about 190 km offshore, was the first major find; first oil flowed from the Liza field before the decade was out, with Hess and CNOOC as partners.

Which Guyanese captain led the West Indies to victory in the first two Cricket World Cups, in 1975 and 1979?

Clive Lloyd hit a century in the 1975 final and captained the West Indies from 1974 to 1985, the years they rose to dominate world cricket.

Guyanese-born E. R. Braithwaite turned his years teaching in London into which novel, filmed with Sidney Poitier?

To Sir, With Love (1959) retells how Braithwaite, a wartime RAF pilot with a Cambridge degree, took a teaching job in London's East End to make ends meet; Sidney Poitier played him in the 1967 film.

Besides Guyana and Suriname, which is the only other place in South America where traffic keeps left?

The Falkland Islands, a British territory, keep left like Guyana, where the habit is a colonial leftover; Argentine forces ordered drivers onto the right during their 1982 occupation, but the old rule returned.

Which regional organisation has its headquarters in Guyana?

CARICOM, the Caribbean Community, keeps its secretariat in Guyana's capital, so the Caribbean's main regional bloc is run from the South American mainland; it was founded by the 1973 Treaty of Chaguaramas.

What was Guyana's capital called under Dutch rule, a name that survives in its landmark iron market?

Stabroek honoured Nicolaas Geelvinck, Lord of Stabroek and president of the Dutch West India Company; the British renamed the town in 1812, but Stabroek Market still carries the old name.

What nickname does Guyana's capital carry?

The capital earned the nickname Garden City of the Caribbean for its boulevards, gardens and colonial-era buildings; it lies below high-tide level, kept dry by a seawall and canals with sluices called kokers.

St George's Cathedral in Guyana's capital, 43.5 m tall, is built mainly from which material?

Timber gives the capital a Gothic Revival cathedral, a style usually raised in stone, that ranks among the tallest wooden churches in the world; Sir Arthur Blomfield designed it and it opened in 1892.

In which sport did Michael Parris win Guyana's first Olympic medal, at Moscow 1980?

Boxing brought Guyana its first Olympic medal: bantamweight Michael Parris stopped Mexico's Daniel Zaragoza in the quarter-finals, then lost his semi-final to Cuba's Juan Hernández, which earned him bronze.

El Dorado rum is made by which Guyanese company?

Demerara Distillers still makes El Dorado on wooden stills of a kind no longer run anywhere else; colonial distillers built them from rot-resistant local greenheart because metal was scarce.

Guyanese pepperpot, the Christmas stew, is flavoured and darkened with which thick black syrup?

Cassareep is the boiled-down juice of bitter cassava; cooks have long credited it with preserving the meat, which is why a pot of pepperpot is reheated and eaten over several days.

Which giant air-breathing fish of Guyana's rivers is among the world's largest freshwater fish?

The arapaima, called pirarucu in the Amazon, can reach about 3 m; because it must surface to breathe, fishers find it easily and harpoon it, and overfishing has made the giants rare.

Which is the largest of the four sea turtle species that nest on Guyana's Shell Beach?

Leatherback turtles, the largest of all living turtles, have no hard shell: leathery skin covers the back instead; they nest on Shell Beach beside green, hawksbill and olive ridley turtles.

Which country borders Guyana to the south and southwest?

Brazil wraps around Guyana's south and southwest; on the border bridge that has linked them since 2009, drivers must switch from Guyana's left-hand traffic to the right.

Which chart-topping singer was born in Plaisance, British Guiana, in 1948 and moved to London as a boy?

Eddy Grant wrote the Equals' No. 1 'Baby, Come Back' and later topped the UK chart solo; his 'Electric Avenue', named after a street in Brixton, reached No. 2 in both Britain and America.

Which Guyanese batsman, famous for a crab-like stance, was named a Wisden Cricketer of the Year in 2008?

Shivnarine Chanderpaul stood almost chest-on to the bowler instead of side-on, yet the odd method brought 11,867 Test runs for the West Indies and a place in the ICC Hall of Fame in 2022.

Which Sri Lankan bowler took four wickets in four balls at Guyana's Providence Stadium in the 2007 World Cup?

Lasith Malinga removed four South Africans in four balls on 28 March 2007, a first in one-day internationals; South Africa had needed only four runs with five wickets in hand when the first of the four fell.

Guyana's footballers play in North America's confederation, not South America's, and in 2019 first reached which tournament?

The Gold Cup is the championship of CONCACAF, which Guyana, Suriname and French Guiana joined for cultural and historical ties to the Caribbean; Guyana's 2019 debut ended in the group stage.

Balatá latex tapped from Guyana's bulletwood trees was once prized as a cover material for which sporting goods?

Golf balls wore balatá covers for much of the 20th century: tappers cut zigzag gashes in the bark and dried the milky sap into a tough, rubbery skin, until synthetic covers replaced it.

From 1838, Indian indentured labourers replaced a plantation workforce lost to what?

Emancipation, complete by 1838, freed the estates' workers, and many left; planters then brought in Indians under indenture until the system ended in 1917, and most of them stayed.

Which Tudor adventurer sailed up the Orinoco in 1595 and wrote The Discovery of Guiana, feeding the legend of El Dorado?

Walter Raleigh found no golden city, but his exaggerated account kept the El Dorado legend alive; a second hunt for gold in 1617 ended in a clash with the Spanish, and he was executed in 1618.

Guyana's Umana Yana, a national monument in the capital, is what kind of structure?

The benab was built in 1972 for a meeting of Non-Aligned foreign ministers and rebuilt in 2016 after a fire.

To which court in The Hague did the UN refer Guyana's long-running border dispute in 2018?

The International Court of Justice, the UN's court for disputes between states, ruled in December 2020 that it could hear the case, although the other side has rejected its jurisdiction.

Which enslaved man led the 1763 Berbice uprising and is honoured today as Guyana's national hero?

Cuffy, an Akan man enslaved on a Berbice plantation, led a rising that lasted from 1763 into 1764 before quarrels among its leaders and Dutch reinforcements ended it; his monument stands in the capital.

Which Indigenous people of Guyana's coast, among its nine recognised nations, call themselves the Lokono?

Arawak is the name by which the Lokono are widely known; their language gave its name to the Arawakan family, which once reached across the Caribbean.

By roughly how much did Guyana's economy grow in 2020, its first full year of offshore oil production?

43% is roughly the World Bank's figure for 2020, a year when the pandemic shrank most economies; Guyana had begun pumping oil only in December 2019 and grew by more than 60% in 2022.