Cayenne – Félix Eboué Airport

Cayenne–Félix Eboué Airport (CAY) is the sole international gateway to French Guiana, serving the capital Cayenne from a site in the commune of Matoury on the Atlantic coast of South America. Operated as part of the French civil aviation network, it handles all of the territory's scheduled jet traffic and acts as the logistical lifeline between the European Union and the Guiana Space Centre at Kourou, which sits about 40 mi (65 km) northwest. The airport's runway, at roughly 10,500 ft (3,200 m), is sized for long-haul narrow-body and widebody service, supporting daily Air France and Air Caraïbes links to Paris-Orly (ORY) together with regional flights to Fort-de-France (FDF), Pointe-à-Pitre (PTP), Belém (BEL) and Paramaribo (PBM). Named for Félix Eboué, the Guianese-born colonial governor who rallied French Equatorial Africa to the Free French in 1940, CAY combines metropolitan-grade passenger facilities with specialised cargo infrastructure used to import Ariane and Vega launcher components. Among South American airports CAY ranks as one of the few operating under European Union regulatory oversight, giving it Schengen-adjacent border procedures and euro-denominated tariffs despite its equatorial setting. Traffic mixes space-agency technical staff, offshore gold-mining rotations, cruise-passenger charters into the Amazon basin and outbound Guianese tourism to the Caribbean, making CAY a compact but strategically outsized field for its population base.