Résumé
In 2002, the law for a Democracy of Proximity was voted by the French parliament. It stated that the State takes care of the conception, the animation and the evaluation of the Natural Heritage. This heritage shall include all ecological, fauna, flora, geological, mineralogical and paleontological items of interest. For the Geoheritage, that is to say the geological sites of natural or human-related interest, Guadeloupe (French West Indies) was chosen as a test territory. Indeed, its geology is very rich and very peculiar, with a lot of variation. It includes for example a carbonate plat-form, living and fossil coral reefs, mangroves, on-shore and submarine thermal springs, a great variety of volcanic deposits, tropical erosion features typical of limestone’s (karsts) and an active volcano. Since 2003, several sites in Guadeloupe have been referenced and described. In 2015, all these sites had been validated at the national level and entered into a national database (IGeotope). This inventory is meant to be permanent and a living collection. Since in 2018, the DFA chapter (Guadeloupe-Martinique) of the Caribbean Academy of Sciences is re-evaluating the previous outcrops descriptions for adding new information to the sites. In the meantime, the CAS also starts working on new descriptions with the particularity of adding human related sites (Mazabraud, 2019). This project should be ongoing for four to five years. When finalized, a territorial geo-heritage catalogue reveals itself a powerful tool for policy making and education (Martin, 2013). Despite the need to inventory the underground for resource purposes (water, mining) that has motivated geological research for centuries, such an inventory is meant to be used for protecting areas of natural interest, for teaching and for developing tourism (Renau and Peissier, 2018).