Paramaribo

Paramaribo's historic core was inscribed on the World Heritage list in 2002, and what it protects is a whole urban fabric rather than a handful of monuments — a grid laid out from 1683 along an axis running north-west from Fort Zeelandia, holding over two hundred and fifty protected buildings. The construction is almost entirely timber: plain, symmetrical facades with shuttered windows and deep verandas, painted white, their form a gradual fusion of Dutch planning with other European and later North American influences and with local materials and craftsmanship. The detail that explains the layout is underfoot and invisible. The main streets follow shell ridges — low natural banks of sand and shell in the coastal plain — which gave a naturally drained base to build on in a landscape that is otherwise waterlogged. The reason the whole thing survives so intact is less flattering and just as true: decades of slow economic growth meant no building lines were altered, no high-rise went up in the centre, and the original pattern was never rationalised away.

The city began at the river, and the point where it began is still standing. Fort Zeelandia, a compact seventeenth-century fortification on the bank of the Suriname River, is the oldest structure in the city and now houses the national museum — the natural first stop for anyone wanting the story of the place before walking through it. Behind and beside it the ceremonial heart of the country opens out: the white Presidential Palace facing Onafhankelijkheidsplein, Independence Square, and directly behind the palace the Palmentuin, a formal garden of towering royal palms that is the coolest and quietest green space in the centre and fills in the late afternoon with people who work nearby. Walking this stretch at either end of the day, when the light is low and the heat has dropped, is the single most rewarding hour the city offers.

The Cathedral-Basilica of Saints Peter and Paul is the building visitors remember, and the reason is structural rather than decorative: from the ground to the top of its towers it is built of wood, on a scale that reads as impossible until you are standing inside it. The facade and the pillars use Surinamese greenheart, an exceptionally dense and durable timber, with the pillars cased in reddish cedar to give the slender trunks more visual weight, and the interior is cedar throughout — unpainted, so the whole vast space glows a warm brown. Its recent history is part of the story: termite damage and a tilting structure kept it closed for about a quarter of a century, a long restoration reopened it in 2010, and in 2014 it was raised to the rank of basilica. It is usually open, usually near-empty, and startlingly cool after the street.

A short walk from the cathedral is the image that ends up on every article about Suriname, and it deserves the attention: the Neveh Shalom synagogue and the Keizerstraat mosque standing immediately beside one another on the same street, sharing a boundary and a car park. It is genuinely the everyday arrangement rather than a staged gesture — both are working congregations, and their neighbourliness is treated locally as unremarkable. Within the same few blocks are ornate Hindu mandirs, Catholic and Protestant churches and Chinese temples, and that concentration is the most compressed expression anywhere of how the country's communities occupy the same ground. The same arrangement runs through Suriname's plural society as a whole: Sranan Tongo is the common tongue between communities, and the public calendar gives national holiday status to the festivals of several of them at once.

The Centrale Markt near the river is the city at its densest: tropical produce, river fish, spices, herbs and household goods under one roof, with the conversation running through several languages at once and a separate section given over to traditional medicinal plants that is worth a look even if you buy nothing. Just outside it the Waterkant runs along the riverbank — a street of old wooden warehouses facing the wide brown water, best at dusk, when the heat lifts and people come out to sit. Eating in Paramaribo is the other reason to give the city more than a night: the Javanese warungs that open early and sell out by midday, the roti shops that are the city's lunch, and the Creole and Chinese kitchens that carry the evening are all within walking distance of each other in the centre. The one dish all of them make is pom, the national dish — grated root baked with citrus-marinated chicken, and finished differently by each community.

Directly opposite the city, reached by a short ferry or a bridge crossing, lies Commewijne — the old plantation district, flat and green, where estate houses, a small fort at the river mouth and quiet roads make an easy half-day by bicycle or car, and where Peperpot, a former coffee and cocoa plantation turned nature park, brings monkeys and birds within a few kilometres of the capital. Paramaribo is also the hinge of every Surinamese itinerary. The international airport sits about forty-five kilometres south at Zanderij; the small airfield at Zorg en Hoop, inside the city, is where light aircraft leave for the interior airstrips; and the road south to the river landings starts here too, which is why the rainforest interior is always reached from this city and never from anywhere else. The practical consequence is worth planning for: arrive, spend a day or two adjusting to the heat, go inland, and come back here for the last night before flying home.