Click to see a larger map

Lying on the northern edge of South America, Guyana stretches 600 km (375 miles) from dense tropical rainforests, through broad savanna and mountains dotted with waterfalls, to the narrow Atlantic coastal plain where most of the population lives. A British colony from 1814 until independence in 1966, Guyana has closer ties with the mostly anglophone Caribbean than with its Spanish-, Portuguese-, and Dutch-speaking neighbors.