Suriname

Suriname is a country in northern South America also considered part of the Caribbean and West Indies, the smallest South American nation by both area and population at approximately 165,940 square kilometers and around 612,985 residents in 2021, with Paramaribo, its capital, holding roughly half the population; over 90 percent of its territory is rainforest, the second-highest proportion in the world. Indigenous settlement dates back millennia, followed by European colonization and Dutch control from the late 1600s, when the economy relied on plantation agriculture and enslaved African labor until slavery's abolition in 1863, after which indentured workers arrived from India and the Dutch East Indies. Suriname achieved independence on 25 November 1975 and remains the only independent state outside Europe where Dutch is the official and prevailing language of government, business, media and education, spoken natively by about 60 percent of inhabitants alongside Sranan Tongo and English as important secondary languages. With no ethnic group forming a majority, Suriname supports among the largest Muslim and Hindu populations proportionally in the Americas, and its economy depends significantly on bauxite, gold and petroleum.