Guyana is famous as the country where a cult killed 918 people in 1978 in Jonestown. Much of the country is uninhabited rain forest.
But today, it has two things to be happier about: newfound oil wealth, and rising tourism. The tourism is a change from a decade ago, when Guyana was impoverished, virtually no one visited the country, and its citizens went to great lengths to escape the country by migrating to Caribbean countries:
From the ninth-floor roof deck of Jewelz, a new luxury hotel in Georgetown’s historic center, the Guyanese capital looks like one large construction zone. A dozen steel cranes loom over the heart of the city, where pastel British colonial-style buildings are shaped like tiered wedding cakes.
To the west, a new 1.6-mile-long bridge swoops across the milky-brown Demerara River, hovering directly over its decommissioned predecessor. To the north, the glass panels of half-built towers along the Atlantic coast gleam under the tropical sun. The once torpid city is suddenly bursting with fresh energy. In fact, locals have started referring to it as the “next Dubai.”
Regarding tourism, Georgetown is brand-new on the map, a rarely used gateway to the country’s richly biodiverse rainforest. Yet by the end of 2026, roughly a dozen Hilton, Hyatt and Marriott hotels will have opened, solidifying the city’s meteoric makeover from a sprawling village to a bona fide boomtown. Since 2020 the World Bank has listed Guyana, bordering Venezuela and Brazil, as having the world’s fastest-growing economy.
“In 2020, when we said we wanted to add 2,000 internationally branded hotel rooms to our stock, people thought we were crazy,” says Oneidge Walrond, who until recently was tourism minister. The minister’s office is near a year-old Best Western that’s so in demand, suites start at $750 per night….“Now it’s hard to find a place [for visitors] to sleep in the capital.”
It’s been a decade since everything changed for this small, English-speaking nation. In 2015, ExxonMobil discovered what’s now estimated to be 11 billion barrels of oil off the coast — giving Guyana one of the largest-known reserves per capita in the world.
Commercial drilling began four years later, and the nation has already earned about $7.5 billion in revenue from oil sales and royalties. That wealth has rippled across society, transforming the capital….International visits to Guyana were up 18% in the first half of 2025, according to the Guyana Tourism Authority, spurred by business travelers on new flights from Europe, the US and Canada. President Irfaan Ali, a former tourism minister, has splurged on infrastructure to keep pace.
Four months ago, Guyana began construction of a new terminal for Georgetown’s Cheddi Jagan International Airport, which will showcase two atria filled with Guyanese flora when completed in late 2027. It is also building a tourism training center in Port Mourant, two hours down the coast from Guyana’s capital, which will train the workers needed to staff the growing hospitality sector.
A 276-mile road will soon be properly paved — including 45 concrete bridges — to connect the nation’s capital, Georgetown, with Guyana’s sparsely populated interior. Less than 10% of Guyana’s 830,000 people live in the interior, but that is where the growing ecotourism industry is centered. It is bringing technological advances and decent roads to the Amerindian population in Guyana’s dense rainforest.
After a reporter spent two days in Georgetown, he flew to a remote airstrip in Lethem to explore the lodges of the Rupununi region, where the waters of the Amazon basin flow past the Guiana Shield, a flat-topped rock formation that’s nearly 1.7 billion years old. “Dirt in the Rupununi is orange, hills are jade green, and the rivers snaking through it all have the hue of steeped tea. Visitors navigate dusty roads in 4x4s during dryer months (September to March); in the rainy season (April to August), the rivers become veritable highways. On my visit in late August, I traverse both. Macaws and mealy parrots squawk in the skies, and kingfishers prowl the riverbanks.”
The reporter took a longboat down the Rupununi river, stopping in oxbow lakes to search for Guyana’s giant fauna and flora — giant anteaters, giant river otters, arapaima fish, and Victoria amazonica lilies. The reporter stayed in rustic thatch-roofed eco-lodges built by Amerindians, such as Rewa Eco-Lodge and Caiman House. Both lodges collaborate with conservation groups to study and protect black caimans, yellow-spotted river turtles and other animals that live in Guyana’s rivers.
