Paramaribo Audio Tours

Paramaribo is one of the most improbable cities in South America: a Dutch colonial capital built of tropical hardwood, where a Sephardic Jewish synagogue and a mosque stand side by side on Keizerstraat, where the Christian cathedral of Saint Peter and Paul is the largest wooden building in the Western Hemisphere, and where the national cuisine is a collision of West African, Javanese, Hindustani, Chinese, Dutch, and Creole traditions that makes arriving hungry an excellent policy. The city was founded as a Dutch trading post in 1613, survived English occupation, fires in 1821 and 1832 that destroyed much of the early settlement, and a Dutch return to sovereignty in 1667 as part of the Treaty of Breda that also handed New Amsterdam (New York) to the English.

The historic inner city, designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2002, contains the most complete surviving collection of 17th and 18th-century Dutch colonial wooden architecture in the world.

The buildings on Waterkant Street along the Suriname River, once the trading houses and warehouses of the sugar economy built on enslaved African labor, now contain government offices, restaurants, and the Fort Zeelandia museum complex. The fort itself, originally English and renamed Dutch after 1667, overlooks the river and contains the history of the colonial period without euphemism, including the period under military dictatorship from 1980 to 1988.