The Wooden City and the Forest Behind It
A synagogue and a mosque sharing a car park, four national cuisines and no argument about which is real. Behind the timber capital are the Maroon nations whose ancestors escaped the plantations, fought the Dutch to a standstill in the eighteenth century, and won a land-rights judgment in the twenty-first.
On a single street in central Paramaribo there is a synagogue and a mosque side by side, sharing a car park, which is the fact every article about Suriname begins with and which is nonetheless worth beginning with. Around the corner is a Hindu mandir. Down the road, a Dutch Reformed church and a Catholic cathedral built entirely of wood, one of the largest wooden structures in the western hemisphere.
Suriname is the smallest sovereign state in South America by population — around 600,000 people — and possibly the most demographically complicated country per capita anywhere. The reason is sugar, and what a Dutch plantation colony did to acquire labour for it over three centuries.
How a country gets this many peoples
The Dutch took the colony from the English in 1667 in exchange for Manhattan, which is the trade everyone mentions and which looked entirely reasonable at the time — sugar was worth more than a trading post on a cold river.
They then built one of the harshest plantation regimes in the Americas. Mortality was such that the enslaved population had to be continuously replenished by import rather than reproducing itself, and Suriname acquired a reputation for brutality that contemporaries commented on.
When slavery was abolished in 1863 — with a further ten years of compulsory apprenticeship attached — the Dutch turned to indenture: first labourers from British India under an 1870 treaty, then, from 1890, from Java in the Dutch East Indies. Chinese and Lebanese merchants arrived through the same period.
The result is a country in which Hindustani, Javanese, Creole, Maroon, Indigenous, Chinese and Dutch-descended communities each form a substantial share of the population, no single group is a majority, and the working lingua franca is Sranan Tongo — an English-based creole that everyone speaks alongside Dutch, which remains the official language and the medium of education.
Suriname is therefore the only Dutch-speaking country in South America, and one of the very few places where a visitor with English gets by mostly on Sranan and goodwill.
The people who left and never came back
The Maroons are the part of the story that has no parallel elsewhere in the Americas at this scale.
Enslaved people escaped Surinamese plantations in large numbers from the seventeenth century onward and established independent societies deep in the rainforest interior, beyond the reach of colonial military expeditions that repeatedly failed against forest, disease and guerrilla defence. By the 1760s the Dutch had given up and signed peace treaties recognising several Maroon nations as autonomous, guaranteeing their territory and paying them tribute.
Six Maroon peoples exist today — Saramaka, Ndyuka, Matawai, Aluku, Paramaka and Kwinti — with their own languages, their own leadership under a granman, and communities strung along the Suriname, Marowijne and other rivers. Their woodcarving, textiles and drumming preserve West and Central African forms that were transmitted continuously rather than reconstructed, and their oral history is a documented source for the period.
The Saramaka took the state to the Inter-American Court of Human Rights over logging and mining concessions granted on their territory without consent, and in 2007 won a judgment affirming their collective right to the lands they had held for three centuries — a decision that is now cited across the hemisphere in Indigenous and tribal land-rights cases.
They escaped, they won a war against a European empire in the eighteenth century, and their descendants won a land-rights case against the same state in the twenty-first.
The reservoir and the road
The largest single event in the modern interior was the Afobaka dam, completed in the 1960s to supply power to an aluminium smelter. It created the Brokopondo reservoir — one of the largest artificial lakes in the world by surface area — and flooded a substantial expanse of forest along with dozens of Saramaka villages, displacing several thousand people whose resettlement remains a live grievance.
The drowned forest is still standing under the water in places, dead trunks breaking the surface, and a salvage-logging industry has grown up around cutting submerged hardwood with underwater saws.
Bauxite drove the twentieth-century economy and has largely wound down; gold has replaced it, much of it small-scale and informal, with mercury contamination in rivers that is well documented and affects Maroon and Indigenous communities downstream disproportionately. Offshore oil discoveries in Surinamese waters, adjacent to the Guyanese finds, are expected to reshape the economy again within the decade.
Independence, and December
Suriname became independent from the Netherlands on 25 November 1975, and the immediate consequence was that roughly a third of the population moved to the Netherlands. Dutch citizenship was available to those who took it before a deadline, and enough people did that there are today large Surinamese communities in Amsterdam, Rotterdam and The Hague — and Surinamese food, music and slang embedded in Dutch urban culture.
The young republic lasted five years. A sergeants’ coup in February 1980 brought Dési Bouterse to power, and in December 1982 fifteen prominent critics of the regime — lawyers, journalists, academics, union leaders, a university dean — were taken from their homes and killed at Fort Zeelandia. The December murders are the defining trauma of modern Suriname, and the fort where they happened is now a museum that addresses them directly.
A guerrilla war followed in the interior from 1986, fought largely between the army and a Maroon-based insurgency, which displaced thousands and included the Moiwana massacre of civilians in 1986 — another case that eventually reached the Inter-American Court.
Democracy returned in 1991. In an outcome that startled international observers, Bouterse was later elected president, serving from 2010 to 2020, while under prosecution for the December murders; he was convicted in 2019 and the case moved through appeal for years afterwards. Surinamese discuss all of this openly and with a range of positions, and a visitor asking about it will get an argument rather than a summary.
What a visitor does
Paramaribo’s historic centre is a UNESCO World Heritage site and the reason is architectural: an intact colonial townscape of white-painted timber buildings with brick foundations, built on a Dutch plan with materials and adaptations that are entirely local. It is small enough to walk in a morning and worth two.
Everything else is upriver. Boats from Atjoni run to the Saramaka villages along the Upper Suriname — Danpaati, Palumeu and others operate lodges in partnership with communities, with the revenue negotiated locally, and a stay involves the village rather than looking at it from a boat.
The Central Suriname Nature Reserve covers over one and a half million hectares of untouched forest, is a UNESCO World Heritage site, and contains the Voltzberg granite dome and the Raleighvallen rapids. Access is by boat and small plane and it is genuinely remote.
On the coast, Galibi at the mouth of the Marowijne is one of the most important nesting beaches in the world for leatherback turtles, which arrive between roughly February and August. The reserve is co-managed with the Indigenous Kalina villages there.
And in Paramaribo, eat everything. Javanese warungs serving bami and saoto soup, Hindustani roti shops, Chinese-Surinamese restaurants, Creole pom at a family table. Very few countries this small have four distinct national cuisines operating simultaneously and no argument about which one is the real one.
Nino reports from the mountains between the Black and Caspian seas — Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan and the high valleys in between. She wrote our Caucasus Loop route and argues, credibly, that supra hospitality is a competitive sport.