Fort Cépérou was a fort that protected the city of Cayenne, French Guiana. It is named after Cépérou, a celebrated indigenous chief who ceded the land.
The original wooden fort was built on a hill looking over the mouth of the Cayenne River in 1643. Over the years that followed the French temporarily lost the site to the Dutch, English and Portuguese. The fort was torn down and rebuilt several times.
French Guiana, or Guyane in French, is an overseas department and region of France located on the northern coast of South America in the Guianas and the West Indies. Bordered by Suriname to the west and Brazil to the east and south, French Guiana covers a total area of 84,000 km (32,000 sq mi) and a land area of 83,534 km (32,253 sq mi). As of January 2025, it is home to 292,354 people.
French Guiana is the second-largest region of France, being approximately one-seventh the size of European France, and the largest outermost region within the European Union. It has a very low population density, with only 3.6 inhabitants per square kilometre (9.3/sq mi). About half of its residents live in its capital, Cayenne. Approximately 98.9% of French Guiana is covered by forests, much of it primeval rainforest. Guiana Amazonian Park, the largest national park in the European Union, covers 41% of French Guiana's territory.
Sépélu (or Cépérou in French) was a seventeenth century indigenous Kali'na chief, or yopoto, in what is now French Guiana. Oral histories recount that he sold or ceded land to the French circa 1643, namely the hill of Fort Cépérou which is now named after him. He is also remembered a native leader who resisted colonisation.
In 2003, Christiane Taubira held a competition to rename the international airport in Cayenne. Its previous namesake, Rochambeau, was deemed unfit because his son, Donatien-Marie-Joseph de Vimeur, had brutally attempted to quell the Haitian Revolution. Four schoolchildren won Taubira's competition with the name Sépélu. However, the airport was eventually named after Black colonial official Félix Eboué in 2012.