Geography

Guyana has a land area of approximately 197,000 square kilometers; Guyana is about the size of Idaho. The country is situated between 1 and 9 north latitude and between 56 and 62 west longitude. With a 430-kilometer Atlantic coastline on the northeast, Guyana is bounded by Venezuela on the west, Brazil on the west and south, and Suriname on the east. The land comprises of three main geographical zones: the coastal plain, the white sand belt, and the interior highlands.

The coastal plain, which occupies about 5 percent of the country's area, is home to more than 90 percent of its inhabitants. Rich clay of great fertility, this mud overlays the white sands and clay formed from the erosion of the interior bedrock and carried seaward by the rivers of Guyana. The plain ranges from five to six kilometers wide and extends from the east to the Venezuelan border in the northwest.

The white sand belt lies south of the coastal zone. This area is 150 to 250 kilometers wide and consists of low sandy hills interspersed with rocky outcroppings. The white sands support a dense hardwood forest. Most of Guyana's reserves of bauxite, gold, and diamonds are found in this region.The largest of Guyana's three geographical regions is the interior highlands, a series of plateaus, flat-topped mountains, and savannas that extend from the white sand belt to the country's southern borders. The Pakaraima Mountain range dominates the western part of the interior highlands. 

The Pakaraima range at 2,762 meters is Guyana's tallest peak. Farther south lays the Kaieteur Plateau, a broad, rocky area about 600 meters in elevation the 1,000-meter high Kanuku Mountains and the low Acarai Mountains situated on the southern border with Brazil.

Much of the interior highlands consist of grassland. The largest expanse of grassland, the Rupununi Savannah, covers about 15,000 square kilometers in southern Guyana. This savannah also extends far into Venezuela and Brazil