49 Fun Facts About Suriname

Which ocean does Suriname's coast face?

The Atlantic Ocean is still building this coast: its currents carry mud westward from the mouth of the Amazon and lay it down as shifting banks along Suriname's shore.

What is the capital and largest city of Suriname?

Paramaribo lost hundreds of buildings to a great fire in January 1821, yet its original street plan survived the rebuilding and remains intact in today's World Heritage inner city.

Suriname is the smallest country by area and population on which continent?

South America's smallest independent country is about the size of Tunisia, yet Tunisia holds some twelve million people and Suriname well under one million.

Which two neighbours lie to Suriname's east and west?

French Guiana and Guyana both have unsettled borders with Suriname, disputes over the upper reaches of the boundary rivers that date from colonial rule.

Under the 1667 Treaty of Breda, the Dutch kept Suriname and let their rivals keep which settlement?

New Amsterdam had fallen in 1664 and already been renamed New York, and the peace let both sides keep their wartime captures rather than hand them back.

Who represented the Dutch queen at Suriname's 1975 independence ceremony?

Princess Beatrix stood in for her mother at the celebrations in the capital, while the queen herself stayed in The Hague and signed the act that made Suriname independent that same day.

More than nine-tenths of Suriname's land is covered by what?

Rainforest survives on this scale because nearly all Surinamese live on the narrow coastal plain, leaving the southern four-fifths of the country almost untouched.

Which language serves as Suriname's everyday lingua franca among its many ethnic groups?

Sranan Tongo even has its own verse of the national anthem: the first is sung in Dutch, the second in Sranan, written in 1959 by the poet Trefossa.

Suriname has the highest proportion in the Americas of followers of which religion?

Islam split Suriname's Javanese community over a compass point: some kept praying toward the west, as their forebears had in Java, while others turned east, where Mecca really lies from Suriname.

In the centre of the capital, a synagogue stands directly beside what other building?

A mosque stands right beside the Neveh Shalom synagogue on Keizerstraat, and the two congregations share a car park, a pairing often held up as a symbol of Suriname's religious peace.

At the 2012 census, Suriname's largest ethnic group descended from indentured labourers from which country?

India supplied the contract workers recruited to replace freed slaves on the plantations; their descendants, known locally as Hindustanis, were more than a quarter of the population.

What are the descendants of enslaved Africans who escaped into Suriname's interior called?

Maroons fought the Dutch to a standstill: the Ndyuka won a peace treaty recognising their freedom in 1760, a full century before slavery ended in the colony.

Who was compensated when Suriname's slavery ended in 1863?

The owners were paid by the Dutch state for every person freed, while the freed themselves were bound to ten more years of contract labour under state supervision.

Which US president's administration opened talks with the Dutch about resettling freed African Americans in Suriname?

Abraham Lincoln's minister in The Hague negotiated a resettlement treaty with the Dutch government, but the Senate never ratified it and nothing came of the plan.

Which army sergeant led the 1980 coup and later served as elected president from 2010 to 2020?

Dési Bouterse was convicted in 2019 of the 1982 December murders and given 20 years, but he never reported to prison and died a fugitive in December 2024.

The 1982 'December murders' of 15 regime critics took place at which landmark in the capital?

Fort Zeelandia is the 17th-century fort from which the old town's street grid was laid out; the arrested critics were taken there, tortured and shot.

In 1990 the army chief dismissed the civilian government in an episode popularly known as what?

The Telephone Coup was bloodless: on 24 December 1990 the army leadership reportedly just rang President Shankar to tell him that his government was finished.

In which event did Suriname's Anthony Nesty take swimming gold in Seoul in 1988?

The 100m butterfly final saw Nesty touch out the American favourite Matt Biondi by one hundredth of a second, winning Suriname's first Olympic medal.

Which of these Dutch football greats has a Surinamese father?

Ruud Gullit's father George came to Amsterdam from Suriname; in 1987 his son dedicated his player-of-the-year award to the then-imprisoned Nelson Mandela.

Suriname's flag has green, white and red bands with what in the centre?

A yellow star sits on the central red band and stands for the unity of the country's many ethnic groups; the design came out of a national competition held before independence.

What is Suriname's highest mountain?

Julianatop stands in the Wilhelmina Mountains, so both the country's highest peak and the range around it carry the names of Dutch queens, a daughter and her mother.

As the Brokopondo Reservoir filled in the 1960s, what did Operation Gwamba rescue?

Wild animals trapped on shrinking islands were caught and released on dry ground: 9,737 of them by the count of the Massachusetts SPCA, which calls it the largest rescue of its kind.

Which ore, mined by Alcoa from 1916 until 2015, dominated Suriname's 20th-century economy?

Bauxite from Suriname met well over half of America's wartime need for aircraft aluminium, which is why US troops were stationed there from late 1941.

Which product was Suriname's biggest export earner in the early 2020s?

Gold comes both from multinational mines and from small-scale miners in the interior, who produce a large share of it and whose mercury has polluted the inland rivers.

What is Suriname's national oil company called?

Staatsolie dates its story from an accident: in 1965 a crew drilling for drinking water in a village schoolyard struck oil instead.

What has been Suriname's currency since 2004?

The Surinamese dollar replaced the guilder on 1 January 2004 at one new dollar to 1,000 old guilders, wiping three zeros off every price overnight.

How does the Surinam toad raise its young?

Eggs develop in pockets on the mother's back, sealed under a layer of skin, and the young never swim free as tadpoles, bursting out as fully formed little toads.

Colonists from which country planted Suriname's first lasting European settlement around 1650?

England held it for under two decades: Lord Willoughby, governor of Barbados, sent the planters over, and a Dutch fleet seized the colony in 1667.

Which community founded the 17th-century plantation settlement on the Suriname River that became a World Heritage Site in 2023?

Sephardic Jews were planters the colony's rulers badly wanted to keep, so the settlers of Jodensavanne were granted freedom of worship and a court of their own.

In which 18th-century tale does a maimed slave in Surinam name the price of sugar?

Candide reaches Dutch Surinam and meets a man who lost a hand to the sugar mill and a leg for running away: 'This is the price at which you eat sugar in Europe.'

From 1954 until independence, Suriname had what status?

A constituent country of the Dutch kingdom satisfied the UN too: in December 1955 the General Assembly agreed the Netherlands need no longer report to it on Suriname as a non-self-governing territory.

Which rebel leader's Jungle Commando fought Suriname's army in the interior war that began in 1986?

Ronnie Brunswijk went from guerrilla leader to vice-president in 2020, and a year later, aged 60, he played 54 minutes of a continental cup tie for the football club he owns.

In July 2025 who became Suriname's first female president?

Jennifer Geerlings-Simons, a former chair of the National Assembly, was elected unopposed by its members a few months before the republic's fiftieth independence day.

Suriname and neighbouring Guyana are the only countries on their continent's mainland that do what?

Drive on the left: Guyana keeps the habit as a former British colony, while how Suriname came by it is disputed, since the Netherlands itself drives on the right.

The Saints Peter and Paul Cathedral in the capital is notable for being built largely of what?

Wood is what the whole cathedral is built of, inside and out. Closed as unsafe in 1989, it stayed shut for more than 21 years, until a restoration let it reopen in November 2010.

Owru Yari, Suriname's New Year's Eve, is famous for which noisy tradition?

Firecracker ribbons called pagaras, long and red, are unrolled through the city centre and lit in relay around midday, half a day before the new year arrives.

Suriname's Hindustani, Javanese and Chinese communities each hold an annual commemoration of what?

The arrival of the first immigrant ships is marked by Hindustanis on 5 June, the day in 1873 when the Lalla Rookh landed 399 survivors of a voyage of more than three months.

Despite its place on the map, Suriname's national football team competes in which continental confederation?

CONCACAF, not CONMEBOL, is Suriname's football home: in 2019 Dutch-born Nigel Hasselbaink, playing on a new sports passport, scored as the team reached its first continental finals since 1985.

Suriname-born Remy Bonjasky, nicknamed the Flying Gentleman, won three world grand prix titles in which combat sport?

Kickboxing made Bonjasky's name after a spell working in a bank: he won the K-1 World Grand Prix in 2003 and 2004, then took the title back in 2008.

In which event did Surinamese athlete Letitia Vriesde win World Championship silver in 1995?

800 metres brought Letitia Vriesde two World Championship medals, yet at five straight Olympic Games from 1988 to 2004 she never once reached the final.

Many Surinamese who left for the Netherlands in the 1970s settled in which high-rise district, later struck by a cargo jet?

Bijlmermeer had new flats standing empty while Surinamese newcomers waited for homes; when housing associations there capped how many they would take, some squatted the vacant flats instead.

Suriname's interior sits on which ancient geological formation?

The Guiana Shield once carried a vast sandstone plateau; erosion left only its table mountains, the tepuis, whose cliff-ringed summits hold species found nowhere else.

What created the Central Suriname Nature Reserve in 1998?

Merging three protected areas and the land between them put about a tenth of the country under one reserve, which became a World Heritage Site two years later.

Which English artist engraved plates for John Stedman's 1796 account of slavery in Suriname?

William Blake engraved about sixteen of its plates from Stedman's own drawings, and the soldier's account of slavery left its mark on his 1793 poem Visions of the Daughters of Albion.

Which naturalist and artist sailed to Suriname in 1699, at the age of 52, to paint its insects from life?

Maria Sibylla Merian went with her younger daughter and planned to stay five years, but illness sent her home after less than two; her book on Suriname's insects appeared in 1705.

Suriname's Galibi beaches are a nesting ground for which sea turtle, the largest turtle in the world?

Leatherback turtles lack the hard shell of their relatives, and watching the females haul ashore to lay their eggs is the main reason visitors make the trip to remote Galibi.

Suriname's name is thought to come from what?

An indigenous people, the Surinen, may have given the country its name, and by some accounts the name outlasted them here: they are said to have been pushed out by other groups before Europeans settled.

Of which regional bloc has Suriname been a full member since 1995?

CARICOM admitted Suriname on 4 July 1995, whereas Mercosur, the big trading bloc to its south, counts it only as an associate, a status made official in 2015.

Who was Suriname's first president after independence, having previously served as governor?

Johan Ferrier, a former teacher, was the last governor under the Dutch crown and the first head of the new republic; months after the 1980 coup the soldiers forced him out and he moved to the Netherlands.