The Country That Struck Oil
A 226-metre waterfall with no railing and nobody watching. Eighty-five per cent forest cover and one of the lowest deforestation rates on earth. And, since 2015, several billion barrels of oil off the coast that have made this the fastest-growing economy in the world. All three are now true at once.
Kaieteur Falls drops 226 metres in a single uninterrupted plunge — roughly five times the height of Niagara — off a sandstone escarpment into a gorge that has no road to it, no railing at the top, and, on most days, no more than a couple of dozen people watching. You arrive by small plane on a grass strip, walk twenty minutes through forest, and stand at the lip with nothing between you and the drop but your own judgement.
That combination — one of the great waterfalls on earth, effectively unvisited — is Guyana in one image. And it is about to be tested, because in 2015 an exploration well found oil off the coast, and the country has since become one of the fastest-growing economies in the world.
An English-speaking country in South America
Guyana is the only one, which is the first thing to know and the thing that most confuses the map. It was Dutch first — the Essequibo, Demerara and Berbice colonies, whose names survive in rivers, a sugar and a rum — then British from the early nineteenth century, independent since 1966. It belongs to CARICOM and looks culturally toward the Caribbean rather than toward Brazil, with which it shares a long forested border and almost no traffic.
The population of around 800,000 lives overwhelmingly on a narrow coastal strip that is below sea level at high tide and protected by a sea wall the Dutch began. Behind that strip, the country is roughly eighty-five per cent forest — part of the Guiana Shield, some of the most intact tropical forest remaining anywhere, with a deforestation rate that has been among the lowest in the world.
The demography is the legacy of sugar. After emancipation in the 1830s, planters imported indentured labourers from India, and their descendants — Indo-Guyanese — now form the largest ethnic group, alongside Afro-Guyanese descended from enslaved people, plus Indigenous Amerindian nations, Portuguese, Chinese and mixed communities. Georgetown has Hindu temples, mosques and Anglican cathedrals within a few blocks, and the food is a genuine fusion: curry and roti alongside pepperpot, the Amerindian-derived stew made with cassareep that is the national dish and traditionally cooked at Christmas.
The wooden city below the sea
Georgetown is built of wood, laid out on a Dutch grid with drainage canals down the middle of the avenues, and sits about a metre below high-tide level. St George’s Cathedral is among the tallest freestanding wooden buildings in the world. Stabroek Market’s iron clock tower is the city’s landmark, and the market underneath it is the loudest room in the country.
The city floods. Sea defences, kokers — the Dutch sluice gates that let water out at low tide and hold the sea back at high — and pumps keep it from doing so more often, and heavy rain periodically defeats all three. The 2005 floods put much of the coastal strip under water for weeks.
The architecture is beautiful and in trouble: Demerara windows angled to catch a breeze without letting in sun, fretwork verandas, wooden shutters, and a maintenance burden that tropical humidity makes relentless. Several landmark buildings have burned in recent decades. Whether oil money reaches the woodwork is one of the questions the next ten years will answer.
The interior
Fly south from Georgetown and the coast’s cane fields give way to unbroken canopy within minutes, and stay that way for an hour.
Kaieteur is the headline. It sits in a national park designated in 1929 — one of the oldest in South America — and its isolation has left an ecosystem in miniature: the giant tank bromeliads at the lip hold a species of golden frog that lives its entire life inside them, and Guianan cocks-of-the-rock nest in the gorge below.
Further south, the Rupununi opens into savanna — grassland cut by gallery forest and rivers, with the Kanuku mountains rising out of it, giant anteaters, giant river otters, black caiman and, genuinely, jaguars seen with some regularity. The community-owned lodges here are the model the country has bet on: Surama, Rewa, Karanambu and others are run by Amerindian villages, with the revenue and the employment staying in the community and the guiding done by people who grew up hunting the same ground.
Iwokrama, in the centre, is a million-acre reserve set up as an experiment in sustainable forest management, with a canopy walkway thirty metres up and one of the best chances anywhere of seeing a wild jaguar from a vehicle at night.
A country with the lowest deforestation rate in the region has just found several billion barrels of oil off its coast. Both things are now true at once.
What oil does to a small country
The Stabroek Block discoveries, beginning in 2015 and continuing through a long series of successful wells, put Guyana’s recoverable reserves in the billions of barrels — an extraordinary quantity relative to a population smaller than that of many cities.
Production began in late 2019 and has scaled rapidly across successive floating production vessels. The country has posted some of the highest GDP growth rates recorded anywhere in recent years, and per-capita output has multiplied within a decade.
The arguments are the ones the resource literature would predict, and Guyanese have them loudly and in public. The terms of the original production-sharing agreement — negotiated by a small country with limited technical capacity against a major international consortium — have been criticised for a low royalty rate and generous cost-recovery provisions. A sovereign wealth fund exists; whether its withdrawal rules survive electoral pressure is untested. The exchange-rate effects of a large foreign-currency inflow threaten the competitiveness of everything that is not oil, which is the classic Dutch disease mechanism, and Guyana’s non-oil economy is agriculture and mining.
There is also the contradiction nobody can resolve. Guyana has argued for years, credibly, that keeping its forest standing is a global public good and that it should be paid for doing so — it signed one of the first bilateral forest-payment agreements, with Norway, and has since sold carbon credits at national scale. It is now also going to be a significant oil exporter. Both positions are defensible on their own; together they are the whole climate negotiation in one country.
Sugar, indenture and the politics that followed
The demographic arithmetic of Guyana has driven its politics for seventy years, and it is worth understanding before anyone tries to explain an election to you.
Indenture ran from 1838 to 1917 and brought around a quarter of a million labourers from India to the colony under contracts that were, in practice, difficult to leave. They worked the same estates on which enslaved Africans had worked before emancipation, and were housed in the same logies. The planters’ intention — stated openly in the correspondence of the period — was partly to break the bargaining power of newly freed Afro-Guyanese workers by supplying an alternative labour force.
It worked, and it left two large communities with parallel but separate histories, different relationships to land, and a mutual suspicion the colonial administration had every reason to maintain.
The independence movement briefly united them. Cheddi Jagan and Forbes Burnham led the same party in the early 1950s; a British intervention suspended the constitution in 1953, and by the end of that decade the movement had split along ethnic lines, with Jagan’s support base becoming predominantly Indo-Guyanese and Burnham’s predominantly Afro-Guyanese. Declassified documents have since confirmed British and American involvement in the manoeuvring that kept Jagan — regarded as a communist — out of power at independence.
Burnham governed until his death in 1985, nationalising the sugar and bauxite industries and presiding over an economic decline severe enough to drive emigration on a scale that means the Guyanese diaspora in North America and the Caribbean is comparable to the population at home.
Elections since have been closely fought and repeatedly contested, most recently in a months-long dispute in 2020 resolved by recount. Oil raises the stakes on every one of them, which is the thing Guyanese say most often when the subject comes up.
The border, and going now
One thing to understand before travelling: Venezuela claims the Essequibo region — roughly two-thirds of Guyana’s territory — a dispute dating to a nineteenth-century arbitration that Venezuela repudiated in 1962. It has escalated repeatedly since the oil discoveries, including a Venezuelan referendum in 2023 and subsequent regional diplomacy. The case is before the International Court of Justice. The territory is administered by Guyana and travel within it is normal; the border with Venezuela is not a crossing to plan around.
For everything else, Guyana is straightforward and rewarding in a way few places still are. English is the official language. The interior is reached by small plane or by a long road south to Lethem on the Brazilian border. The lodges are community-run and book directly. There is no tourist infrastructure to speak of, which means there is also no tourist economy distorting anything.
That will change. It is changing now. Go while the aeroplane to Kaieteur still has empty seats.
Erik writes about coasts, cold water and the communities that work them — from Lofoten cod seasons to Pacific whale camps. He owns more wool than furniture.