Brownsberg, Brokopondo Reservoir and Jodensavanne Day Trips from Paramaribo

Driving south from Paramaribo along the paved Afobakaweg highway takes you within an hour from the coastal polder plain into the white-sand savannas and primary Amazonian rainforest of the Surinamese interior. Two contrasting day excursions stand out: the seventeenth-century brick ruins and carved marble gravestones of UNESCO-listed Jodensavanne above the Suriname River, and the 500-metre rainforest plateau and waterfalls of Brownsberg Nature Park overlooking the vast Brokopondo Reservoir.

Jodensavanne and Cassipora Creek (UNESCO World Heritage Site, 1685)

Fifty kilometres south of Paramaribo on a breezy, forested hill overlooking a curve of the Suriname River lies Jodensavanne ("Jewish Savanna"), inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in September 2023. Founded in the 1650s to 1680s by Sephardic Jewish families fleeing the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisitions via Amsterdam and Dutch Recife (Brazil), and granted full religious freedom and local judicial autonomy by the English and Dutch colonial governments, Jodensavanne became the only autonomous agricultural Jewish town in the Americas, surrounded by more than forty sugarcane plantations.

• Beracha Ve Shalom Synagogue (1685): At the centre of the cleared hilltop plaza stand the red-brick foundations and lower walls of the Beracha Ve Shalom ("Blessing and Peace") Synagogue, consecrated in 1685 as the oldest architectural synagogue building in the Americas (predating the brick synagogue in Recife and those in Curaçao and Newport). After the community gradually relocated downriver to Paramaribo's Neve Shalom and Sedek Ve Shalom synagogues and the 1832 fire destroyed the remaining wooden houses, the forest reclaimed the hilltop.
• The Cemeteries and Geneesbron Spring: Beneath the rainforest trees of the Jodensavanne Cemetery and the nearby 1667 Cassipora Creek Cemetery rest more than 450 finely carved Carrara marble and bluestone tombstones inscribed in Hebrew, Portuguese, Spanish, and Dutch with skull-and-hourglass and felled-tree motifs. A short boardwalk leads down to the Geneesbron ("Healing Spring"), a cool, amber-coloured natural spring still visited for its mineral waters.

Brownsberg Nature Park (1969) and the Brokopondo Reservoir

Continuing 130 kilometres (roughly 2.5 hours by 4x4 vehicle) south of Paramaribo brings you to the 12,200-hectare Brownsberg Nature Park, established in 1969 and managed by the Foundation for Nature Conservation in Suriname (STINASU). Named after nineteenth-century gold prospector John Brown, the park occupies a flat-topped bauxite and laterite mountain plateau rising 500 metres above sea level.

From the Mazaroni plateau viewpoint, you look directly out across the 1,560-square-kilometre Prof. Dr. Ir. W. J. van Blommestein Meer (Brokopondo Reservoir), created between 1961 and 1964 when the Afobaka Dam impounded the Suriname River to power the country's alumina industry, leaving thousands of bleached rainforest tree trunks rising above the water around Stone Island (Ston Island). Well-marked rainforest trails descend from the plateau rim through giant buttress-rooted trees where troops of red howler monkeys, white-faced saki monkeys, grey-winged trumpeters, and poison dart frogs live, leading to the refreshing natural shower cascades of Leo Falls and Irene Falls before your evening return to Paramaribo.