27 June 2018

On our way back to Saint Laurent du Maroni from Apatou and the Camp de la Forestière, we turned off down a side road to the small hamlet of Sparouine. This is one of the former but lesser known sites located along the Maroni river where vestiges of the penal colony are still visible.

Our guide Manon has family in Sparouine and she also spent a year living in the hamlet. Although the ruins are not hidden and easy to locate on the river bank and although everybody knows about the bagne, it is still possible to forget that they are there. I had expected them to be located in the forest in accordance with an aesthetics of ruins based on some of the other sites we have seen where the vestiges have been abandoned.