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Guyana
The English-speaking corner of South America
Guyana is South America's only English-speaking country, a small nation on the continent's northeastern shoulder that looks culturally toward the Caribbean even as it sits firmly on the mainland. Once a sleepy land of sugar plantations and rainforest, it has been transformed by one of the largest oil discoveries of the twenty-first century, making it among the fastest-growing economies on Earth. Behind its narrow coastal strip, where most people live, stretches a vast interior of dense forest, savanna, and the spectacular single-drop plunge of Kaieteur Falls.
The coastal plain, much of it below sea level and protected by a colonial-era seawall, holds the capital Georgetown and the bulk of the population. Inland the land rises into rolling forested hills and the Guiana Highlands, table mountains shared with Venezuela and Brazil, where Mount Roraima forms a dramatic tripoint. Rivers like the Essequibo cut north to the Atlantic, and the Rupununi savanna spreads across the south. The climate is hot and humid, with heavy tropical rains, and rainforest blankets roughly four-fifths of the country.
Settled by the Dutch and later British, Guyana drew laborers from Africa and, after emancipation, large numbers of indentured workers from India, producing a society split between Afro- and Indo-Guyanese communities whose rivalry has shaped its politics. Independence came in 1966. For decades Guyana was one of the poorer countries in the hemisphere, but offshore oil has upended that, raising hopes of prosperity alongside fears of inequality and an intensifying border dispute with Venezuela over the Essequibo region.