Guyana’s gifts to the world – By Alex Murray – BBC News

Guyana’s gifts to the world

By Alex Murray  – BBC News  – 26 May 2016

Guyana Map 2015It’s 50 years since the British colony of British Guiana became Guyana.

Covering 214,969 sq km (83,000 sq miles), it is the only English-speaking country on mainland South America.

In popular culture, the country is sadly best known for the tragic events of Jonestown, where more than 900 people died in a mass suicide.

To mark the 50th anniversary of independence, BBC News highlights some of the positive contributions from “the land of a thousand rivers”.

The Lost World        

Mount Roraima, a tabletop mountain on the borders of Brazil, Guyana and Venezuela

Mount Roraima

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s sci-fi dinosaur adventure draws heavily on the Guyana Highlands – which extend across three countries – Brazil, Guyana and Venezuela.

Lying on the border of all three, Mount Roraima’s tabletop shape is unmistakably that described in the book.

It was first scaled by a European team in 1884, according to Unesco, by “a British expedition team led by Everard Im Thurn”.

You might also recognise it for inspiring the landscape of the Disney/Pixar film Up.   [Read more]

By guyaneseonline, on October 13, 2016 at 12:25 am, under Arts / Culture, Commentary, Geography, Guyana, History. Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , . No Comments
Post a comment or leave a trackback: Trackback URL.

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

Gravatar
WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Google photo

You are commenting using your Google account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Cancel

Connecting to %s

%d bloggers like this: