New Amsterdam (Guyana)

Located about 100 km southeast of the capital, Georgetown . It is located on the eastern bank of the Berbis River, about 6 km from its confluence with the Atlantic Ocean .

The population of the city is about 33 thousand people.

Initially, the city was located 90 km upstream of the Berbis River (also on its right bank). After the Dutch founded Fort Nassau , a settlement began to develop around it, from which settlements began to budge. One of such settlements was the village of Fort Sint Andris ( Dutch Fort Sint Andries ), founded in the 1740s. The village developed rapidly, and at the beginning of the second half of the 18th century there was already a Lutheran church, a court, a tavern and two forges. When in 1763 there was an , the rebel leader Kuffy made the courthouse his headquarters. After the rebels were forced to leave this place in 1764, the village was burned to the ground, only the brick building of the Lutheran church survived (Fort Nassau was destroyed even earlier by the Dutch authorities to prevent it from falling into the hands of the rebels).

After the uprising was suppressed, the settlement began to recover, but it soon became clear that it could no longer be the center of the colony: the planters moved to more fertile lands in the lower reaches of the Berbis River, and the center of economic activity of the region shifted there. In 1785, a fundamental decision was made to relocate the administrative center, and in 1790, residents of the Fort Sint Andris settlement were allocated land in a new location and were given 6 months to relocate. Thus arose the settlement of Nieuw-Amsterdam ( Dutch. Nieuw Amsterdam ).

After the Napoleonic Wars began, during which the Netherlands was occupied by France, during the First Coalition War these lands were captured by the British in 1795. In 1802, in accordance with the Amiens Peace Treaty , they were returned to the Dutch, but hostilities soon resumed, and the British again occupied these territories . The London Convention of 1814 secured the transfer of the colony to British rule, and the name of the city, meaning "New Amsterdam", began to be read not in Dutch, but in English, like New Amsterdam . In 1831, the United Colony of Demerara and Essexibo , with New Amsterdam as the administrative center, was merged with the Berbis Colony into a new administrative unit, the British Guiana Colony. Georgetown became the capital of the new colony, and New Amsterdam lost its capital status.